POLE''S "ARBEITSBUCH FUR AUSLANDER" WITH ANGRY ANTI-NAZI DRAWINGS

POLE''S "ARBEITSBUCH FUR AUSLANDER" WITH ANGRY ANTI-NAZI DRAWINGS

An excellent item, an "Arbeitsbuch fur Auslander", an identity book issued to foreign workers, this one issued to a Polish man with the rear of the document filled with angry anti-Nazi drawings undoubtedly made just after war's end. The book was issued to a worker named "Biarzejowski", who defaced his first name and cropped the bottom of his signed photo within in order to avoid identification. The 30-year-old man is described as "stateless (Pole)" and was issued the book on April 15, 1944. It shows his employment as an "unskilled laborer" in a sawmill until just days before war's end, May 3,1945. The rear of the book contains 15 different drawings in ink and colored pencil undertaken by at least three different artists. The images include SS men and bedraggled prisoners, a Soviet soldier squeezing the life out of a Nazi in a book press, Stalin poring over a map, people being hanged from a giant swastika, an SS man being "spanked", Hitler being choked to death, etc., with most of the images anti-SS in nature. The last portrays a Nazi with a devil's horns and is signed by a Greek fellow laborer and dated 1945. An evocative piece!