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“In penetrating the ugliness of dark colors, an unseen beauty emerges. Painting acts as a support for the climb upwards.” (Maandag, 1989)
“We, here in this wretchedness, no less. What is beauty, what is poetry?” (Abel Herzberg, December 4, 1944)1
The prolific Dutch Jewish painter and ceramicist Sieg Maandag was liberated, at the age of seven, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a moment captured in a well-known image by Magnum photographer George Rodger (Bernard & Marlow, 1999, pp. 136-137; Sollors, 2014, pp. 57-84). Maandag was among the few surviving orphaned children of Amsterdam's so-called Diamond group of prisoners, who were temporarily exempted from deportation because German authorities deemed them “valuable” for potential diamond industry-related work (Skorczewski & Siertsema, 2020; Siertsema, 2020). For a time, they and their families formed part of a “privileged” group of prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen, along with others, including those with connections abroad and certain foreign passports, on the premise that they might be exchanged for German civilians and prisoners of war and to fulfill German strategic aims in the latter years of the war. The Dutch Diamond Jews held in the so-called Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen were exempt, albeit temporarily and only relatively speaking, from some of the harshest features of camp life, although they too withstood brutal, unforgiving conditions that deteriorated markedly as Belsen shifted into an alleged “recuperation camp” for the sick and began to receive prisoners evacuated in a westerly direction from the front.2 The Maandag family arrived together at the camp from Westerbork and were permitted to remain
together for a time, until Maandag's parents were transferred separately to other camps. Sieg would never see his father again and reunited with his mother after the liberation.
Maandag's testimony regarding his deportation and experiences in the camp, and to some extent as I will posit here, his postwar ac