Leo Haas

Born in Opava, Silesia, Austria-Hungary, Haas studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 1919 to 1922 and then in Berlin with Emil Orlik and Willy Jaeckel.

After the Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Haas, who came from a middle-class Jewish family, was deported to the "Juden-KZ" Nisko, a forced labor camp personally supervised by Adolf Eichmann.

[2] Immediately before being taken for interrogation, the artists managed to produce many hundreds of drawings[3] and also to hide the picture book For Tommy on his third birthday in Theresienstadt 22.1.1944 by Bedřich Fritta for his son Tomáš.

On 27 November 1944, Haas was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the Sonderkommando for Counterfeiting, together with other "specialists" and the note "return undesired".

In his biography, he emphasised that he had consciously chosen this path and against a "pure" artistic career as a painter because of his concentration camp experiences.

[2] In the Gestapo prison Small Fortress Theresienstadt, Erna Haas took intensive care of Bedřich Fritta's three-year-old son, Tomáš.