HAAS, LEO

HAAS, LEO (1901–1983), Czech painter and cartoonist. His most important works were his drawings in the concentration camps of Nisko and Theresienstadt (Terezin) during World War II. In tortured lines and a grotesque expressionism, they captured the squalor and misery of human beings awaiting death. He hid the drawings in Terezin, but later recovered them, having survived Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen. Haas studied in Berlin and Vienna, and became director of a lithographic printing house in his birthplace, Opava. After the war, he returned to Czechoslovakia to become one of the leading political cartoonists of the Communist press. In 1955 he left for East Germany. He is represented in museums in Prague and East Berlin. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: F. Hermann, et al. (eds.), Terezin (Eng., 1965), 156–61, 319. (Avigdor Dagan)