From tape-recorded and live narratives of Adolf Frankl

I distribute paint on the canvas with my fingers, brush and palette knife, without any plan
or model to follow. The ghosts crawl out of the darkness.

After some hours, I need to lie down, I am exhausted. In the evening, when everyone else
is asleep, I get the canvas out and from my bed I observe the painting for hours. First with
my hand, then with one eye, then with a mirror I look for a solution, for a way to explain
to others the awful thoughts that rage behind my eyes. There, through my shut eyes, I
see the Jewish girls, the flowers of Zion, standing at the barbed wire fence of the camp,
like they did when I came to Birkenau, legs apart, or else they would tumble down, bent
forward… Those eyes – I cannot forget them!

And there again, rats, ugly fat rats, the only creatures with always something proper to
eat! Up to these days I have been haunted by the stench of burnt human flesh and hair,
and I still see the smoke escaping from the chimneys of the incinerators. I will never shake
it off, I feel myself drowning in this thick stench.

Visions from the Inferno • about 1959

I return to the canvas. The colors and the blurred contours of the faces are starting to
take shape. I like the bright, garish colors. Like fire they should shine! The depth effect of
the colors makes up the basis of my works. When painting, I do not pay any attention to
whether what I am doing is good or bad.

Out of the patches of color my VISIONS form themselves – without my paying any heed
to perspectives, dimensions, phrases or directions. Being an eyewitness, a sufferer myself,
I want to conjure the indescribable fear and the undeserved fate of millions of Jews, of
other fellow prisoners, of children and of those unborn. In such moments, I am seized with
righteous anger and with memories carved indelibly on my mind, I seek to capture them
with my hands, to express them in such a way that this tragedy become a warning
testimony to future generations.

An art critic once told me that one of my paintings reminded him of motifs used by
Chagall. However my paintings reflect my suffering and the ordeals that I personally
endured … This is Frankl – not Chagall!