Kantor | Phillips

Alfred Kantor was a Holocaust survivor whose story continues to resonate through its extraordinary visual testimony. After completing my work at Sobibor, I felt compelled to continue the Those Who Were There collection with a narrative that approached the Holocaust from a profoundly different set of circumstances, yet arrived at the same devastating outcome shared by millions.

Kantor’s experience unfolded outside the General Government, placing him within a system shaped by shifting borders, ideologies, and identities. Despite these differences, his fate was driven by the same machinery of persecution and annihilation. Through this contrast, his story exposes the vast reach of the Holocaust and the adaptability of its methods.

Following his liberation, Kantor produced a remarkable pictorial study drawn entirely from memory. These works are not illustrations of history, but acts of witness. They reveal the sheer scale of the Holocaust and the way propaganda was used to construct an illusion of order, relocation, and survival—masking the reality of the Final Solution. His images confront the viewer with the dissonance between what was promised and what was ultimately delivered.

This project traces Kantor’s journey through three countries—Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany—guided by the chronology of his paintings and written testimony. Along this path are forced labour, deportation, and a death march, a point at which survival itself becomes an act of resistance. Kantor lived, and because he lived, he remembered. Because he remembered, he recorded.

Published twenty-five years after the events, Kantor’s book now resides in New York, removed by time and distance from the places it documents. This body of work seeks to return his testimony to the physical and historical landscapes from which it emerged, bringing forward a lesser-seen perspective of the Holocaust—one shaped not only by suffering, but by the determination to bear witness.

Kantor | Phillips continues the mission of Those Who Were There, The Holocaust: to preserve memory through visual storytelling, to challenge simplified narratives, and to remind us that history is not only written in documents, but carried by those who survived to tell it.