Auschwitz Museum Publishes Prisoner’s Hidden Sketches

The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has published sketches drawn by a prisoner at the Birkenau extermination camp. The 32 pencil sketches, made before 1943, were stuffed inside a bottle and hidden for four years until their discovery by a former-prisoner working as a watchman at the site.

The art works are signed ‘MM,’ and museum officials believe they were intended as a documentary record, depicting details like car license plates, guard insignias and prisoner badges. ‘The author of the sketchbook hoped that someone would find his work so that it would become a witness to extermination,’ said art historian Agnieszka Sieradzka.

The sketches were published to mark this year’s 70th anniversary of the beginning of gassings at Birkenau. View more of the sketches here.