Arnold Daghani's Memories of Mikhailowka The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor

'Why aren't you painting yourself a loaf of bread?' Arnold Daghani was asked in May 1943 by one of the guards at Mikhailowka, the Nazi slave labour camp in Ukraine. Like other Jewish prisoners, the artist and his wife went in constant fear of starvation and death, but Daghani persisted in making a record of their sufferings by means of striking watercolours and a cryptic diary, secretly composed in English in a shorthand notebook. It was indeed his artistic gifts that earned them the right to spend a few nights outside the barbed wire, enabling them to make a daring escape.

Deborah Schultz is Research Fellow at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, and Assistant Professor of Art History at Richmond University and Regent's College, London. Edward Timms is Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005.