HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL WEEKEND

Artist Arnold Daghani (né Arnold Korn) was born into a Jewish family in Suczawa, now part of Romania, and studied fine art informally in Munich and Paris during the 1920s. A gifted linguist, he then moved to Bucharest, found work as an export clerk, and changed his surname from Korn to Daghani. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, then an earthquake in 1940, Daghani and his wife, Anisoara, moved to Czernowitz, from where, in 1942, they were deported to the Czernowitz Ghetto. They were then transferred to Mihailowka labour camp in the Ukraine to work on a Nazi road-building project, known as the DGIV, where Daghani made haunting sketches of his fellow prisoners and documented their conditions. In June 1943 the couple were transported to Gaisin, under orders to create a mural for the August Dohrmann Company’s headquarters; from here they made a daring escape wading across the river Bug, carrying artworks, and in December 1943 they were liberated from the Bershad Ghetto. 

After the war, the couple left Romania in 1958. They spent two years in Israel before travelling to Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France, then finally settled in England in 1977. Arnold Daghani died in Hove, Sussex on 6 April 1985.

Daghani was a prolific artist and documented his fragmented life of upheaval and change through both his artworks and writings, despite suffering from chronic depression and occasional suicidal tendencies. His oeuvre encompassed many genres from images of everyday life to still-life drawings, collages and lithographs, as well as paintings, many with a particular focus on the Holocaust. His work after the war shows his interest in religion, with many works presenting both Christian and Jewish subjects, often depicted in ink line drawings, as well as the difficulties of emigration. Daghani also made numerous self-portraits, and his visual and textual works are indicative of extensive self-reflection concerning the difficulties of being an artist.

The university of Sussex holds the typed manuscripts of Daghani’s extended diaries that he worked on during his later years, in which he combined his earlier narrative with transcripts of legal testimonies from Lübeck, followed by testimonies including Walter Gieseke, the SS officer in charge of building the 1,000 mile road across Ukraine on which Daghani and Anisoara were forced to work. However, after nearly ten years, the investigations were annulled as inconclusive for lack of evidence and no court proceedings were held. Remarkably, in 2006, a reel of film was discovered in Devon, in which Gieseke was identified and clearly associated with the road building project, though the research of British historian G H Bennett.