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April 30, 2015
Kalman-AronPhoto by David Miller

On a June day in 1941, Kalman Aron, then 17, hurried with his parents and older brother to Riga’s railway station, hoping they’d be able to escape to the Soviet Union before the Germans occupied Latvia. But as they neared the station, they saw Latvian soldiers machine-gunning the Jews already gathered there. “There was yelling, screaming, crying,” said Kalman, who remembers seeing bodies sprawled on the ground. He and his family hastily retreated, only to encounter two Latvians shooting from the rooftop of the five-story apartment building in front of their house. Kalman’s brother was hit in the shoulder, but they kept running, entering the building’s front door, then running out the back to reach their house. “Everybody was frightened,” Kalman recalled.

Kalman was born Sept. 14, 1924, in Riga, Latvia, to Chaim and Sonia Aron. His brother, Henech, was five years older.

The family lived on the first floor of a small house where Chaim, a women’s shoe designer, also maintained his workshop. Chaim’s brother David and his family lived upstairs.

As far back as he can remember, Kalman loved to draw. At age 4, his father bought him a small easel. Three years later, his charcoal and pencil portraits were exhibited in a local gallery, selling out in one day.

Word of Kalman’s talent spread, and at 14 he was commissioned to paint an oil portrait of Latvia’s president, Karlis Ulmanis. Ulmanis then arranged for Kalman to enter the Art Academy of Latvia. “I was the youngest person to attend,” Kalman said.

After the Soviets occupied Latvia in June 1940, Kalman was tasked with painting a mural of Soviet soldiers atop a globe on a building five stories high.

About a year later, in early July 1941, Germany occupied Latvia, instigating large-scale persecutions of the country’s Jews. Almost immediately, Latvian soldiers, working for the Nazis, pounded on Kalman’s front door. Sonia quickly hid the boys in a wardrobe in the back bedroom, but the soldiers took Kalman’s father and uncle. “We never saw them again,” Kalman said.

By mid-August, the Germans began relocating Riga’s Jews to the ghetto, where Kalman and Henech shared a small room with two brothers, and Sonia lived elsewhere.

As slave laborers, Kalman and Henech were trucked out of the ghetto every morning; Kalman worked long days in a factory sorting fur coats for Luftwaffe pilots headed to the Soviet Union, and Henech was assigned to a furniture factory.

One evening, Kalman and Henech returned to find the ghetto eerily empty and their mother gone. After awhile, a few people emerged from cellars, where they had been hiding. Kalman later learned that thousands of Jews had been rounded up and marched to the Rumbula Forest, where, after being forced to undress and lie face down in a pit, German Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and their Latvian collaborators shot them in the head. This was one of two aktions, which took place on Nov. 30 and Dec. 8, 1941, in which approximately 26,000 Jews were murdered. Two years later, as the ghetto was being liquidated, Kalman and Henech, along with others, were trucked to Kaiserwald, a concentration camp outside Riga. When they arrived, they were told to undress, ostensibly to shower, and then forced to stand naked for hours in the bitter cold.

About two weeks later, Kalman and Henech were shipped on separate transports to Poperwahlen, a small, forced-labor camp.

One time, as Kalman and several others were carting away a tree they had felled, Kalman heard his bone in his shoulder crack. But with a gun-toting guard standing nearby, he couldn’t stop. “If I dropped the tree, I would be dead,” he said. To this day, one of his shoulders is lower than the other.

At Poperwahlen, Kalman made a drawing of a German guard. “I could do a good likeness in five minutes,” he said. Seeing it, the camp commandant locked Kalman in a room, giving him a photograph of his parents and instructing him to draw miniature portraits to fit a locket ring. Kalman continued to draw for the Germans, receiving a sandwich or loaf of bread for his efforts.

The prisoners were moved to Dundaga, another forced-labor camp, and then, in the summer of 1944, marched to the Baltic Sea and taken by boat to Stutthof concentration camp. There, Kalman found his brother. “We were very happy, of course,” he said. But the reunion was short-lived, as soon afterward, Kalman was transported to Buchenwald, arriving on Aug. 16.

Next, he was transferred to Rehmsdorf, a subcamp near Leipzig, where he and the other prisoners worked in a synthetic-fuel refinery. Blaring sirens often interrupted their work, warning of Allied air raids, sending prisoners and Germans outside. One day, a bomb exploded on a hill behind the factory, burying Kalman up to his eyes with dirt.

Around April 6, with Allied artillery sounding in the distance, the prisoners were again loaded onto cattle cars. But the tracks had been bombed, and the train was stranded for four days with the prisoners trapped inside with no food or water.

When the train began moving, the Allies resumed bombing. The train again stopped, and many prisoners escaped into the woods. Kalman hid in a deserted house but later rejoined the captured prisoners. “If I stayed there, I would have been dead,” he said. They were marched to Theresienstadt, 52 miles over four days.

Soon after they arrived, on May 9, Soviet troops entered Theresienstadt. “You can’t imagine how happy we were,” Kalman said.

But then some Soviet soldiers trucked Kalman, along with five others — all Latvians and Lithuanians, considered Soviet citizens — to a bombed-out house in Czechoslovakia. Afraid they’d be drafted into the Soviet army, they escaped, making their way to Prague.

From there, Kalman eventually reached Salzburg, where he lived with other displaced persons in Camp Herzl.

In the camp, Kalman drew portraits, which resulted in his receiving a full scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Viennain 1946. There, he found housing and food in short supply, but, he said, “I was determined to finish art school.”

In the summer of 1949, Kalman and his wife, Trude (Gertrude) Schneider, immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles.

After a six-month stint painting ceramics at a Glendale company, Kalman got a job making maps for Fairchild Aerial Surveys in downtown Los Angeles. A year later, he quit to pursue his art.

Kalman began sketching portraits of children at a school across from his and Trude’s house in Silver Lake. He then began to earn money painting portraits of children.

Kalman and Trude divorced in 1956. After a second marriage ended, Kalman married Tanis Furst in 1968, divorcing sometime after their son, David, was born in February 1970.

Kalman had continued to search for his brother Henech, finally learning from the Red Cross around 1960 that he was living in Latvia and was married with four children. Fearing that he’d be detained in Latvia, however, Kalman was never able to visit him. But they corresponded, and, in the 1960s and ’70s, occasionally spoke by telephone, up until Henech’s death (Kalman is unsure of the date).

Kalman has done portraits of Ronald Reagan, Andre Previn and Henry Miller, among others. His work, which also features landscapes, has been exhibited nationally in museums and galleries and locally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. He is currently engaged in nonobjective painting, a unique style he calls “Kalmanism.”

Now 90 and married to Miriam Sandoval since Nov. 22, 2005, Kalman continues to work full time, often drawing or painting until midnight or later.

Kalman first told his story to the Shoah Foundation in 1994. More recently, he collaborated with Susan B. Magee on “Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron,” published in 2012 (kalmanaron.com) and available on Amazon.

Kalman credits his art for saving his life. “If I didn’t have pencil and paper, I would have been dead in the ghetto,” he said.

To see Kalmans art, visit http://kalmanaron.com/the-art/To visit Kalman’s art studio, open daily by appointment, call 310.553.6923.

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