"The Madness" by Walter Spitzer (Poland/France, 1927-2021), heliogravure on Arches vellum, signed in pencil and in plate, and published in 1963, limited edition numbered 50/125, loose - 8 1/2" x 10 3/4"
 
As Jews in Poland in 1939, Spiterz and his family where forced to live in a ghetto. His mother was shot and killed by the Nazis in 1943. Afterwards, Spitzer was deported to Blechhammer, a subcamp of Auschwitz. There he painted portraits of Wehrmacht soldiers and fellow inmates in exchange for food. He was one of the few to survive the evacuation march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in late February 1945. To enable him to make drawings documenting life in the camp, the Communists organized his transfer to the main camp. While on a forced march in early April lead by Russian troops, he made his escape in the vicinity of Jena and was soon in the hands of the Americans. In June 1945 the Americans took him to Paris, where he began to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts the following year. After completing his training as an artist he produced paintings expressing a critical view of the society of his day. In 1955, in commemoration of the camps and the death marches, he executed a cycle of nine etchings in an edition of thirty, which he gave to various museums in Israel and in France. In the 1960s he established himself as an illustrator of exclusive editions of works by such authors as André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Kessel, and Nikos Kasantzakis. The Six-Day War prompted him to begin painting subjects from Jewish and Biblical history; in 1993 he made the sculpture Muselmann for a Jewish memorial at the Buchenwald Memorial. His memorial to the deportation of the French Jews in Paris was inaugurated by President François Mitterrand in 1994.