Bedřich Fritta

Born September 19, 1906 in Višňová u Frydlantu, Czechoslovakia; died November 8, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Background
He worked as a cartoonist and graphic designer in Prague before the war.

Internment in Theresienstadt
On November 24, 1941, Fritta was among 342 Jewish men from Prague deported by the Germans to Theresienstadt as part of the Aufbaukommando (construction battalion). In Theresienstadt he worked in the Technical Department, the Zeichenstube, where many artists were assigned. There he had access to drawing materials and paper, and he and other artists made drawings of  Theresienstadt and its prisoners. On July 17, 1944, he was arrested with other painters there for creating what the Nazis called "horror propaganda."  He was sent along with his wife. Hensi, and three-year-old son, Tommy, to the Little Fortress. Along with his friends, Bloch, Ungar and Haas, he was tortured. His wife died of starvation.

Transfer to Auschwitz
With the painter Leo Haas, he was deported to Auschwitz on October 26, 1944 and he died there on November 8, 1944. Fritta's son was adopted after the war by Leo Haas and his wife. An album made by Fritta and dedicated to his son on his third birthday was found hidden in the walls at Theresienstadt.

Bibliography
Novitch, Miriam, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and Tom L. Freudenheim.  Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940-1945.  Philadelphia, 1981.

Seeing through "Paradise." Artists and the Terezín Concentration Camp. Boston, 1991.

Tommy. To Tommy for his Third Birthday in Terezin, 22 January 1944. Reprinted by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, 1999.