Mieczysław Kościelniak, Portrait of Xawery Dunikowski, 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim
XAWERY DUNIKOWSKI
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Mieczysław Kościelniak, Portrait of Xawery Dunikowski, 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim |
Background
Xawery
Dunikowski studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and became Professor of
Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1902. 1909 he was appointed to the Chair for Sculpture at the Kraków Academy
of Fine Arts. His pre-World War II oeuvre
included two major sculpture cycles: Heads
from the Kraków Palace and Pregnant
Women.
Arrest and Deportation to Auschwitz
May
15, 1940, Dunikowski was arrested in Kraków by the Gestapo
and on June 26, deported to Auschwitz, where he was assigned prisoner number
774.
Work Assignments at Auschwitz
He
was assigned to various labor details, then to the Auschwitz Camp Museum, and
finally to the construction office, where he was ordered to build a model of
the camp. Despite several requests by
SS guards, Dunikowski refused
to produce any sculpture at Auschwitz. He
later said: "I died there, and couldn't do anything at all."
Illness, Accusation of Resistance Involvement,
and a Commuted Sentence
1942,
Dunikowski fell ill with typhus and was sent to the prisoner infirmary. He was selected to be gassed but was saved
by a Polish physician, who crossed his name off the list of infirmary patients.
September 1943, Dunikowksi was accused of belonging to the camp resistance
movement, thrown into a cell in barrack (Block) 11 and sentenced to be shot,
but his sentence was commuted.
Art Produced at Auschwitz
Dunikowski
returned to the camp hospital, where in 1944, during a long recovery process,
he began to make sketches and portraits of his fellow prisoners. A large number of these drawings were smuggled
out of Auschwitz by other prisoners, one of whom, Wacław Weszke, worked in a
labor crew outside the camp and smuggled drawings out by wrapping them around
his legs under his trousers. The drawings
were later sent to Kraków.
Liberation and After
Dunikowski was
still hospitalized when the SS evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945. He was liberated by the Red Army that month,
on January 27, 1945. Dunikowski resumed
his professorship at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in 1946 and saw major exhibitions
of his work held in Kraków in 1948, Warsaw in 1949 and 1958, Moscow in 1949
and 1958, and Venice in 1954. 1955 Dunikowski
moved to Warsaw, where he created the second version of his pre-World War II
cycle Heads from the Kraków Palace.
Throughout Dunikowski's postwar career, he completed many sculptures, monuments,
drawings, and other works about his experiences at Auschwitz.
Bibliography:
Jaworska,
Janina. Nie wszystek umrę... Warsaw, 1975.
Kodurowa,
Aleksandra, ed. Xawery Dunikowski.
Exhibition catalogue. Warsaw, 1975.
Langbein,
Hermann. Der Auschwitz-Prozeß: Eine Dokumentation. 2 volumes. Frankfurt am Main, 1995.
Mansbach,
S.A. Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939.
Cambridge, 1999.
Milton,
Sybil and Janet Blatter. Art of the Holocaust. New York, 1981.