Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about sketches from a concentration camp that turned up in a closet in Westchester County and that are now in an exhibition at Manhattan University in the Bronx. We’ll also get details on the deaths of two detainees at Rikers Island.
If no one had noticed a leather satchel that had been forgotten in a closet — if the satchel had been thrown out — an art exhibition that opened last week could not have happened.
In the satchel were more than 20 chilling sketches — a man in a prisoner’s uniform being beaten, prisoners amid the emaciated bodies of other prisoners, prisoners in a line for food.
The sketches are from a concentration camp at the end of World War II, the work of someone who survived: a member of the French Resistance named Marcel Roux. They are on display at the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University, a Lasallian Catholic institution in the Bronx.
The university said the story behind the exhibition started in 1993, when Kenneth and Helene Orce bought a house in Westchester County. The seller was Ruth Epstein, a widow whose husband, William Epstein, had been an Army doctor in World War II. William Epstein, who was later an obstetrician and gynecologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, died in 1990.
The Orces renovated, as new owners do. In a closet they found the satchel. It was apparently William Epstein’s from the war. The only marking on it was a piece of tape with the words “Capt. Epstein — Please Return 20 Field Hosp.”
The bag had been left behind when Ruth Epstein moved out. The Orces asked whether she wanted it. She did not.
The bag contained the sketches, a few postcards and photographs of beaches, buildings and American military aircraft, along with two handwritten notes to her husband and some newspaper clippings.
Years later the Orces emailed images of the sketches to an official with the Holocaust art archive in the museum division of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center, who said that the drawings were the work of Roux, who had been held at the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp in Germany in the days after it was liberated by the U.S. Army.
The Orces gave the sketches to Manhattan University; Kenneth Orce, a retired lawyer, is an alumnus.
“The sketches Roux did are really the story of living in the camp, given as a gift to Captain Epstein,” said Mehnaz Afridi, the director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center. “He wanted to put everything in a visual representation of what had happened to him. What’s amazing is that he made these sketches really quickly.”
But mysteries accompany the sketches. Who was Roux?
Afridi said that he had been a member of the French Resistance, as was his wife. A paper prepared for the exhibition said that Roux, who was 41 when the war ended, was not Jewish. But he spent nearly three years in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp north of Berlin, before he was moved to Buchenwald in early 1945 and then to Langenstein-Zwieberge, a subcamp.
“Roux was not a professional artist in the conventional sense,” the paper for the exhibition said. “His artistic production appears to have been limited, private and shaped entirely by the circumstances of his imprisonment.” He apparently had no formal training in art.
Afridi mentioned another mystery. “He used colored pencils, and the paper is lined graph paper, we would call it today,” Afridi said. “Where did he get the paper? Where did he get the pencils?”
He inscribed the sketches, in French, to “mon ami le capt. Epstein.”
“It’s almost like he was desperate to tell his story,” Afridi said, “but the only way was through his sketches.”
Weather
Expect a partly cloudy day; temperatures will be around 76, and morning showers are possible. Partly cloudy conditions are expected to continue tonight, with a low around 64.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Holy Thursday, Passover).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The people of the city, the people of this state, the people of this country, they do not want to see our kids go hungry. They do not want people to sleep out on the street or lack health care. They want the very rich to start paying their fair share of taxes.” — Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, at a rally in the Bronx at which he called for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to raise taxes on the wealthy.
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2 Rikers detainees die
Two people being detained at the Rikers Island jail complex died in the past week. They were the first detainees to die there since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office in January.
He announced the two deaths on X, adding in one post that “Rikers must close, and we will pursue every avenue to do so as quickly as possible.”
The mayor faces a 2027 deadline to close Rikers. But he and Stanley Richards, the commissioner of correction, must deal with a new leadership structure that took away their direct control of the jail. Last year, the federal judge overseeing the jails as a result of a class-action lawsuit appointed Nicholas Deml, a former commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, to replace the mayor as the main person making major decisions. He will work with Richards and a federal monitor who has been on the job for more than a decade.
On Wednesday, Barry Cozart, 39, was found needing medical attention, according to the Department of Correction. He was pronounced dead at 11:33 a.m. after staff members performed C.P.R., the agency said.
On Saturday, John Price, 49, was taken to Elmhurst Hospital. He was pronounced dead on Sunday morning. The medical examiner’s office has not released the cause of death for either man.
By the beginning of April last year, five people had died in custody or just after they were released from Rikers. The toll rose to 15 by the end of 2025. Five people died in 2024.
METROPOLITAN diary
Catch of the day
Dear Diary:
I was working at the headquarters of a large restaurant company in Midtown. My office was next to the purchasing department, which regularly received samples of food products.
As I was about to leave one day, someone asked if I wanted a large, fresh steelhead trout of maybe 15 pounds. I said I did and decided to take the fish home in a foam cooler lined with ice packs.
The cooler was heavy, and I had to get it to my Upper East Side apartment. It could be a challenge to get a cab outside the office during rush hour, but luckily a cab with its light was pulling away from a hotel across West 44th Street.
After hailing the cab, I opened the door and jumped into the back, hugging the cooler onto my lap.
Just then, a young woman opened the door on the other side and slid in next to me. I asked where she was going.
To visit someone at the hospital, she said.
Her destination was on my way with a minor detour to York Avenue, so I offered to drop her off at my expense.
There were a few minutes of awkward silence, and then she spoke.
“What’s in the cooler?” she asked. “A dead fish,” I replied.
Nothing more was said until she got out at the hospital.
— John Harding
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Sketches Found in a Closet Reveal Reality of the Holocaust appeared first on New York Times.
