WE ARE NOT THE LAST, BY ZORAN MUŽIČ

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Zoran Mušič (12 February 1909 – 25 May 2005) was a Slovene painter, graphic artist and draughtsman.

In October 1944, he was arrested by the Nazi German forces and a month later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he made more than 100 sketches of life in the camp, some under extremely difficult circumstances. From the drawings, mainly executed in May 1945, he managed to save around seventy. After liberation by Americans in April 29, 1945, Mušič returned to Ljubljana. There, he was subjected to the pressures by the newly established Communist regime and moved to Gorizia at the end of July 1945. In October 1945 he settled in Venice.

Excerpt from a conversation between Zoran Music and art historian and critic Jean Clair (source: La barbarie ordinaire, 2001):

What was your first impression of Dachau?

Corpses everywhere. You couldn’t count them. It was a hallucinating world, a kind of landscape with mountains of corpses. (…)

You often speak of “landscapes of corpses”…

Yes, it became a landscape because, when one saw hundreds, thousands of corpses, this was something indescribable. A painter expresses himself in these terms, he sees a landscape. (…) An artist can draw anything. More or less, better or worse. But when one sees a landscape of dead, it is quite different from the drawing of a leg at the Institute of Medicine. There, it is like a still life. But the camp was like a landscape, a forest of dead bodies. A virgin forest, if you may say so. You cannot describe it, you cannot imagine it. Those things were hallucinatory, unreal.