Man of Auschwitz and Father of Orphans

Two woodcuts from the Warsaw Woodcuts series by Pittsburgh-based Artist and Professor Bruce Carter. This series is the product of Carter’s twenty-year long study of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe. Established by the Germans in October 1940, and sealed that November, the ghetto housed approximately 400,000 Jews.

His chosen medium – that of woodcut prints – depicts these horrors with a bold starkness. In an interview with Los Angeles Times, Carter said of his works:

“They are, one, a memorial…Two, they’re a warning..I hope they can learn something about the misuse and abuse of power.”

Carter was a professor of printmaking and drawing at Carnegie Mellon University from 1963 until 1993. He passed away in 2016.