Lost Auschwitz portrait of Chopin rediscovered

A PORTRAIT of composer Frederic Chopin which once hung in Auschwitz has resurfaced at the home of a Polish university professor nearly seven decades later.

Painted in 1943 by Auschwitz prisoner and artist Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, who was Polish, the portrait was one of a series of pictures created as part of a public relations campaign to obscure the treatment of inmates at the Second World War death camp where German Nazis killed about 1.5 million people.

The series of portraits by Mr Koscielniak, who died in 1993, were thought to have been destroyed by Nazis ahead of the camp’s liberation in 1945.

The portrait’s current owner Aleksander Skotnicki, a professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, realised the significance of the painting in his apartment last month, just days before the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

He came across the portrait’s description in a book about Mr Koscielniak, whose initials “MK” and the year of the painting, appear in its corner.

Prof Skotnicki said: “I received the portrait from my secretary, Krystyna Szymanska, who apparently got it from a member of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, Jan Sehn.”

The portrait originally hung in a building where the Auschwitz prisoners’ orchestra held its rehearsals. The room was spruced up because the camp commander and SS soldiers would invite guests to hear the orchestra play.

The portrait, showing the Polish composer’s profile, was exceptional because the Nazis frowned on art not linked to German or Austrian culture.

Hundreds of Mr Koscielniak’s drawings documenting the horrors of everyday life for Auschwitz inmates have been preserved and remain on display at the camp’s museum.