Artist for Life : In Retirement His Landscapes Are Shifting, but Rossmoor Man Still Credits His Survival of the Holocaust to a Painting

ROSSMOOR —  The exact details of the mural that helped save Bill Salamon’s life escape him now.

It took up one wall in the cafeteria where his Nazi captors would enjoy their meals. A picture of a German soldier sitting on a bench, his arm casually draped around a young girl’s shoulder, he recalls. He was 16 when he painted it.

“I probably survived the concentration camp because I knew how to paint and draw,” said Salamon. “In the winter of 1944, when prisoners went out to work in the field or to be tortured and came back with frost bite . . . I was in a room painting a mural.”

In 1944, five years after the start of World War II, 21 members of Bill Salamon’s family boarded a train for Auschwitz. Only four survived the yearlong ordeal that took the young artist to Nazi concentration camps and the edge of death.

Today, sitting in his Rossmoor home, surrounded by pictures he has painted, Salamon recalls the stories of his life. He tells of being a young boy growing up in Hungary, how drawing was something that came naturally to him. About coming to Chicago in 1949 after being orphaned in the war--only to be drafted by the Army.

There is also the tale of falling in love with his wife, Carol, whom he met in 1956. And the story of being forced to go to the concentration camps in 1944. And how he painted to keep his Nazi guards happy and from killing him.

Each tale is a separate piece of his 65 years, woven together with his art.

“I used to paint very sad paintings,” said Salamon, whose voice still carries its Hungarian accent. “I have a pretty good life now . . . . I have happier paintings now.”

He was born in 1928 in Chust, a town in the Carpathian Mountains that was once a part of Czechoslovakia and Hungary before being taken over by Russia after the war.

He was the youngest of four children born to Hajnal and Martin Salamon. His mother was a seamstress who worked hard to adorn her children with finely tailored clothes; his father was a carpenter who supported his family by crafting furniture.

Growing up in the mountains of Hungary, he doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t painting or drawing. Unlike most children who would squander their pennies on candy, young Bill would use his change to buy pencils and paper.

His art was always proudly displayed on the walls in the kitchen.

Life went on largely unchanged in the town of 24,000 until the war. His older brother and one sister had already moved away to start their lives in other cities. Salamon was training to make his living as a furrier.

While many Jews were being forced to concentration camps beginning in the late 1930s, Salamon’s family did not go until 1944. It was in March of that year that a poster appeared in Chust telling all Jews that they had to meet in the town square in order to be taken away. The propaganda was so intense they thought they were going to work on German farms.

“After three days of rattling in a cattle car, we arrived. I hate to tell you now how innocent I was . . . . I looked out the window and said to my mother ‘Look it can’t be that bad, (pointing to the prisoners) they are still in their pajamas,’ ” Salamon said. “She kept saying, ‘At least we are all together.’ ”

The Jewish guards, picked by the Nazis to unload the prisoners and strip them of their possessions, told the family they had made a grave mistake and scolded them for coming.

“We sat there clutching our belongings. They said, ‘Why did you come? You fools. You are all going to die.’ ” Pointing to the crematoriums, the guards told them, “See those smoke stacks. That is human flesh coming out of them.”

In the seconds that followed, Salamon stood in a line with his family as they were separated into those who would live and those who would not. A few cousins, grandparents and young children were immediately sent to the crematorium. Bill, along with his father, mother and sister, Adlele, were spared.

From that day he began a terrifying odyssey that in a year took him to concentration camps at Auschwitz, in the Warsaw Ghetto and at Landsberg, Germany--the city where Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” and where Salamon would spend the majority of his time imprisoned.

Even though he starved for weeks at a time, was forced to walk in the freezing cold from one camp to another and almost died, Salamon said that after being in Auschwitz, nothing else was quite as horrific.

At Landsberg, he was ordered to paint Christmas gifts for the families of Nazi guards. Still a child himself, Salamon decorated mugs with holly and the names of the children of those who held him prisoner.

“In the daytime, (the guards) did the torturing; it was their job. And at night they would sit around the fire and enjoy Christmas with their children. It was very ironic.”

That winter, those running the camp had another project for him: Work alongside a German soldier to do the mural in the guards’ cafeteria. Salamon said he doesn’t recall just how he was chosen for the indoor task. But, he said, prisoners didn’t volunteer for anything.

During that brutal winter, the prisoners were starving and dying from disease. An epidemic of typhoid fever broke out and his father, who was in his early 40s at the time, died.

Salamon was emaciated from not eating, infested with lice and further weakened by typhoid. He had no idea if his sister and mother were alive. He was alone and wanted to die. There was no way to know the war was just months from ending.

“We would see at night the Allied bombers. I remember thinking I wish they would drop a bomb here. We were like skeletons.”

In May, 1945, the German guards marched the prisoners, who were surviving by eating leaves and snow, out of Landsberg and on to Dachau. Salamon remembers telling an older man who was helping him walk that he was dying.

A few days later, when the prisoners woke up after having spent the night sleeping in a field, their guards were gone. Instead, there were German soldiers waving white flags. The war had ended.

The day he was liberated, Salamon took his first bath in a year, ate his first piece of bread in weeks and slept in a haystack. He regained some strength and eventually went to a displaced persons camp. On his way to the camp he spotted his sister, Adlele, in a crowded train station.

Her memory of the moment is vivid.

“I was sitting there in the station and there were all kinds of soldiers going home from the battlefields and different kinds of people in the concentration camps, there was just such coming and going,” said Adlele, who now lives in Canada. “I was very thirsty and I went to look for some water and all of a sudden I heard--my God I still get goose bumps--’Ada, Ada.’ It was my brother.”

Starting to cry, she recalls their first words. “He said to me ‘Where is mother?’ and I said ‘Where is father?’ He told me father had died of hunger and starvation. I said I didn’t know where mother was.”

But Adlele did know where her mother was. She had died in the gas chamber in Auschwitz, but the young girl, just a year older than her brother, continued to look for her mother wherever she went, asking people on the streets if they had seen her.

“After a while, my brother and I went home (to Chust) and we waited for someone to come home and nobody did.”

Later, in a relocation camp, the brother and sister slowly began to plan the rest of their lives. Adlele met her husband, Tibor, whom she married in the camp in 1947.

Bill slowly got back to his drawing.

One of his early works, an ink drawing dated 1947, shows his walk from the Warsaw Ghetto to the concentration camp in Landsberg. Several men dressed in black-striped suits, with diamond shaped heads resembling skeletons, are dying in the road. Some of the prisoners try to help while others, dazed by the walk, continue chaotically onward.

The drawing hangs with other works on the wall of his kitchen.

In the early years after the war, when he could find time to devote to his art, he concentrated on abstracts and very tight and controlled paintings.

After emigrating to Chicago, he began taking art lessons at the Chicago Art Institute. However, less than a year later he was drafted by the Army during the Korean war.

Out of 1,100 in his basic training class, only 29 did not go to fight. He was one of them. His art had once again influenced his destiny--this time it kept him from combat. Salamon was ordered to Washington, D.C., where he illustrated Army manuals.

He earned his sergeant’s stripes early by impressing his superiors with his work on the manuals and by decorating the camp for Christmas. To make ends meet, he also drew portraits for his fellow servicemen who gave them as gifts.

After he was discharged, Salamon was able to concentrate again on painting for himself.

The day he came to Los Angeles he got a job doing lettering for the May Co., where he earned his living until retiring recently. He has studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and continues to take classes at area colleges.

Salamon has exhibited his work throughout the Los Angeles area, recently finishing “An Art Scene” at the Cypress Community Center. His work has won a number of prizes locally.

The walls in Salamon’s home are filled with his work, the pictures tracing the evolution of his art and life.

There are landscapes in lush blues and greens and several watercolor portraits, a woman sitting near the ocean, fishermen coming back from a journey and three children selling Kool Aid at a roadside stand. A painting in dark orange, red and black, dated 1950, shows a mother and child with nowhere to go, their dreams devastated by the Holocaust.

Since retiring, he has more time to paint, sometimes finishing as many as three portraits a week. Dozens of his artworks are stacked in his garage-turned-studio. Frames hang from nails on the beams overhead, a bench holds jars filled with paints and brushes.

While he once sought more control in his work, today, his art is much freer, the lines less calculating. He does a lot of landscapes now. Although less solemn than his earlier works, his recent pieces still have a melancholy feel. But Salamon doesn’t attribute that quality to his experiences in the concentration camps.

He said there are no nightmares to interrupt his sleep; that he has not been left bitter or discouraged. Although he is not religious, he believes in fate and luck. And that good things can result from bad. “I feel kind of proud that I survived,” he said.

But while he no longer puts the scenes from the Holocaust on canvas, at night when he can’t sleep he makes himself remember, painting the pictures in his mind.

“I see in front of me all the departed ones . . . so I won’t forget,” Salamon said . “To me it is important . . . there is a prayer that says if you don’t remember, you are bound to repeat.”