Ryszard Apte
On November 15th, 2012, the Galicia Jewish museum in Kraków opened an exhibition of the work of a young artist and writer, Ryszard Apte, a Polish citizen of Jewish heritage, who perished in the holocaust in 1942.
Part of sketch by Ryszard Apte
Ryszard Apte, 1922-1942, was born into a wealthy Polish-Jewish Cracovian family. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a patron of the arts. He was a promising musician, writer and artist, who during his short but productive life, had contributed to the publications, Okienko na Świat, ‘Eye on the World’, and Nowy Dziennik, ‘New Journal’.
The story of the survival of some of his art and writing in a number of school notebooks, is a remarkable one. During the early war years, the Apte family rented a home from the Piasecki family in Wielicza. When Ryszard Apte was deported to a concentration camp in Stalowa Wola, where he died in 1942, he left his notebooks in the care of the Piasecki family, who fortunately preserved them for some seventy years, until 2009, when they decided to publicise the contents of his notebooks.
The Piasecki family themselves also suffered their own trauma during the Second World War, the family’s eldest son having died in Auschwitz, and these painful memories were apparently the reason for their not wishing to publicise Ryszard Apte’s work.
Little is known of Ryszard Apte outside Poland, and there is, for example, no English wikipedia entry under his name. This is part of my motivation for writing this article about him.
The exhibition of his work runs until March,2013. Entrance is free.
Below are images of Ryszard Apte’s notebooks, and one of his sketches.
The notebooks in which Richard Apte’s writing and drawing were found
Ryszard Apte’s drawings
A sketch by Ryszard Apte
English editor, A native of the Isle of Wight, Warren has been running the language teaching company, Go! Languages, with his wife Małgorzata, since 1997. A fan of England, Portsmouth F.C. and Pogoń Szczecin, Warren will be contribing articles on football for the Szczecinian.
This post is also available in: Polish
You may also like:
