© Klaus Meyer estate

This poignant print was created by the German-born Jewish artist Klaus Meyer in 1982, forty years after most of his family, including his mother, brother Ulrich and his wife Annemarie, perished in Auschwitz. Upon fleeing to Britain, Meyer himself was interned at the Onchan Camp on the Isle of Man (1940-1942). The heads and shoulders of two women, a man and a young child are depicted in an oval reminiscent of an old-fashioned photograph. The family is visually confined behind two rows of barbed wire, stretched between two wooden posts. The wire creates a barrier between them and the viewer, evoking a sense of imprisonment and distance. Meyer’s work is an interesting example of two different printing techniques employed in one print: while the ‘photographic’ element is a linocut, the barbed wire and fence are a woodcut, the latter chillingly evoking the physical texture of a camp’s wooden fence.