Drawing for Others: Care, Visibility, and Moral Ambiguity in Auschwitz-Birkenau

In concentration camps, survival often depended on being useful — and visible in the right way. For Marianne Grant, drawing for children in Auschwitz-Birkenau became both a form of care and a dangerous exposure. This article looks at how art operated in the children’s block: as a relational practice that offered brief protection, and as a skill that was later exploited under coercion. Grant’s story challenges simple ideas about art, morality, and choice under conditions of extreme violence.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, drawing was never innocent. And yet, it was precisely innocence — fragile, incomplete, and constantly threatened — that Marianne Grant tried to protect.

Drawing for children

Assigned to work in the children’s block, Grant found herself among those who had been stripped not only of their families, but of any sense of continuity. The children had arrived at the camp through violence and rupture: separated from parents, deprived of familiar routines, surrounded by fear they could neither fully understand nor escape. Some were too young to grasp where they were or why they had been taken there. Others understood far too much. The children’s block was not a refuge from the camp’s brutality, but it was distinct in one crucial respect: within it, a minimal form of care still existed — tolerated, supervised, and always contingent. It was in this space that art took on a new function.

“For Grant, drawing in Auschwitz was no longer only a skill that made her visible or useful within the camp hierarchy. In the children’s block, it became relational. Drawing was not something she did alone, or merely as a strategy of survival. It was something she did with others — shaped by the presence, needs, and responses of the children themselves.”

Using scraps of paper, charcoal, and improvised pigments, Grant taught the children to draw. She encouraged them to recognise shapes, to choose colours, to imitate lines. She painted murals on the walls of the barracks: animals, trees, imagined landscapes, figures drawn from fairy tales and popular culture. Mickey Mouse and Bambi appeared alongside forests, houses, and paths leading somewhere beyond the barbed wire. These images were not chosen for their symbolic power or resistance value. They were chosen because they were recognisable — because they belonged to a shared world in which childhood had once been possible.

Drawing did not erase fear. It did not stop hunger, selections, illness, or death. But it changed the texture of time. For brief moments, fear did not occupy the entire room. For a few minutes, the children could concentrate, laugh, imitate one another, argue over colours, or become absorbed in the act of making something. In these moments, they were no longer defined solely as prisoners. They were participants in an activity that assumed attention, agency, and imagination.

For Grant herself, these moments mattered profoundly. Caring for the children anchored her to others at a time when isolation could be fatal. Art became a way of remaining human with others, not only inwardly or privately. It created a temporary community grounded not just in shared suffering, but in shared focus and mutual recognition. In a system designed to fragment social bonds, drawing became a fragile practice of togetherness.

This relational dimension complicates later interpretations of camp art as either documentation or resistance. In the children’s block, art was neither. It did not aim to record atrocities, nor did it announce itself as defiance. It was presence. It was care. It was the deliberate creation of a narrow space in which the camp’s total claim over the individual was momentarily suspended. Yet this space was never secure.

Art under coercion

The same visibility that allowed Grant to draw with the children also exposed her to scrutiny. The murals were seen not only by the children, but by guards and SS personnel. Drawing existed only insofar as it was tolerated. In Auschwitz, nothing remained neutral for long. What could be allowed one day could be forbidden the next; what offered protection could quickly become a liability.

This shift became brutally clear after Grant fell ill with pleurisy. An SS officer who had noticed her artistic skill intervened. When no medical treatment was available, he brought her bread and butter — a gesture that likely saved her life. At the same time, he commissioned her to create hand-painted storybooks for his own children, and later demanded a portrait as a gift for his wife.

“Art now crossed a dangerous threshold. What had functioned as care and protection became a commodity extracted by power.”

Through these commissions, Grant’s work came to the attention of Josef Mengele. From that moment on, drawing was no longer something she could choose to do. It became an order.

Mengele assigned her to produce detailed drawings documenting the bodies of prisoners subjected to his medical experiments — particularly twins and people with dwarfism. She was instructed to draw family trees, physical markings, and anatomical features. Precision was demanded. Detachment was required. Emotion was irrelevant. The same disciplined hand trained years earlier in Prague was now forced to serve a system of pseudo-scientific cruelty.

This was not art as survival through exchange. It was art under coercion — extracted, commanded, and instrumentalised. Grant did not control what she drew, for whom, or to what end. Her drawings were taken from her immediately. She did not know how they would be used, nor whether they would survive. What she knew was that refusal was impossible. Here, the moral tension embedded in camp art becomes unavoidable. Grant’s drawing saved her life, but it did so by entangling her in a system that inflicted harm on others. There is no clean ethical resolution to this fact.

To frame her work for Mengele as collaboration would be a profound misreading. To frame it as resistance would be equally misleading. It was neither. It was coerced labour carried out under the constant threat of death. What distinguishes Grant’s experience is not moral purity, but moral clarity. She never romanticised this period. She did not retrospectively justify her actions, nor did she collapse under guilt. She described the situation as it was: something she was forced to do in order to stay alive. Survival did not erase the violence of the act; it coexisted with it.

Even in this context, traces of her earlier relational work remained. Mengele eventually permitted her to paint murals again in the children’s block — an extraordinary concession that exposes the contradictions of the camp system. Art could be tolerated, even encouraged, when it served the regime’s interests or reduced unrest. That these same murals might also sustain the humanity of prisoners was incidental.

Grant’s experience reveals the limits of any attempt to categorise camp art neatly. In Auschwitz, art was never free. It existed within a dense web of power, threat, and survival strategies. The question is not whether art was compromised — it was — but whether compromise erased its meaning. For Marianne Grant, it did not. But it changed it irrevocably. What emerges from this part of her story is not a comforting narrative of art as salvation, but a far more demanding one: art as care under threat, art as labour under coercion, art as a fragile practice constantly reshaped by violence. It is precisely this fragility — and this refusal of simplification — that gives Grant’s work its enduring ethical weight.

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Inspiring Questions for Classroom Discussion

1. The text states that drawing in Auschwitz was “never innocent.” What does this mean, and can innocence still exist in such conditions?

2. How did drawing with children change the meaning of art for Marianne Grant—from a survival skill into a relational act of care?

3. Why did creating familiar images (animals, fairy-tale figures, landscapes) matter in a place designed to destroy continuity and childhood?

4. How should we understand art that offers moments of togetherness and humanity, even when it cannot stop violence or death?

5. When Grant was forced to draw for Mengele, her art became coerced labour. How does this complicate simple ideas of art as resistance or collaboration?

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Editorial note

This article is based on the publication Painting for My Life: The Holocaust Artworks of Marianne Grant (2021), by Dr Joanna Meacock, Peter Tuka, Deborah Haase, and contributing authors. The book is one of the most comprehensive studies of Marianne Grant’s life and work, presenting her art as a first-hand visual testimony of the Holocaust and offering crucial insight into the role of artistic practice under conditions of extreme violence.