Holocaust survivor’s drawings discovered in closet, now on display at Manhattan University

After spending decades hidden in a closet, drawings created by a Holocaust survivor in  1945 are now on display at Manhattan University. Found in a timeworn black briefcase, the sketches offer a rare, firsthand record of life inside Nazi concentration camps.

Before moving into their new Scarsdale home, Ken and Helene Orce undertook significant renovations, tearing out walls and reworking rooms. In one room, an unusually long closet lined the wall. When it came time to remove it, the discovery came as a surprise.

“The closet in one of the rooms we were ripping out,” Helene said. “Ken was kind of putzing around because he didn’t like what [contractors] were doing, and when he pulled at something in the closet, this briefcase fell on his head.”

Inside was a carefully packed archive, fragile and browned with age, containing more than two dozen sketches in colored pencil, along with photographs and documents.

The drawings, later identified as the work of Marcel Roux, a member of the French Resistance — a network of underground groups that opposed Nazi occupation in France — who was captured by Nazis as a political prisoner, not a Jewish detainee.

While imprisoned, Roux documented scenes of starvation, violence and survival inside Langenstein-Zwieberge, a subcamp of Buchenwald in Germany, where he was held and forced into hard labor.

At first, the Orces did not fully grasp what they had found.

“It was fascinating,” Helene said. “We were just looking at them, and not having any personal connection with the Holocaust. It wasn’t quite as disturbing to us in the beginning, until we began to study it, and thought, “Oh, my God, this is real.”

The drawings themselves form a visual record of daily life inside the camp. In one, a prisoner in striped uniform is beaten. In another, skeletal figures gather around bodies already reduced to skin and bones. Others show men standing in line for food, or collapsing under the weight of forced labor.

They were created in the final weeks of the war, after American troops liberated the camp and Roux, then in his early 40s, began to record what he had endured. He was not a trained artist. The materials appear on thin, sometimes lined scrap paper.

Each drawing was inscribed in French to “my friend, Captain Epstein,” a reference to Dr. William Epstein, a U.S. Army physician who served in a field hospital unit that treated survivors after liberation, including Roux. The case in which the drawings were found appeared to belong to the doctor, who later built a career in New York.

Alongside the sketches were personal items, among them postcards, photographs of  military aircraft, newspaper clippings and handwritten notes.

The Orces learned the home they purchased had belonged to Epstein’s wife, Ruth, who moved out and left the case behind. When they reached out through a caretaker to see if she or her family wanted the contents returned, the answer was no. The briefcase, and everything inside it, remained.

For 32 years, the drawings sat in a file cabinet in the Orces’ home. They showed them to friends and family, occasionally revisiting the question of what to do with them. At times, Helene said, they considered throwing them out, unsure of their significance or where they might belong. Each time, they hesitated.

“We said, no, we can’t dump this,” she explained. “This has got to go somewhere.”

They reached out to several institutions, including museums and Holocaust archives, but often encountered a similar response: the drawings could be accepted into collections, but would likely remain in storage, unseen by the public.

Instead, they decided to hold onto the sketches, waiting for the right place.

That opportunity emerged through Manhattan University, where Kenneth is an alumnus. The drawings were brought to the university’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center, where Mehnaz Afridi, the center’s director, began to study them. What followed was part research, she said, and part reconstruction.

Afridi contacted archives in the United States and abroad, including major Holocaust research centers, piecing together what could be known about Roux and the camps he passed through.

At the same time, Afridi began examining the drawings themselves. Initially, they appeared as individual scenes. But as she laid them out and studied them more closely, a pattern emerged.

“I put them on the ground and started looking,” she said. “And then I realized there was a sequence.”

The images, when arranged in a particular order, traced a progression that echoed documented accounts of camp life: morning roll call, the distribution of meager food, forced labor, punishment, execution and burial. What Roux had created was not only a series of sketches, but a narrative.

Today, that narrative is on display at Manhattan University. To protect the originals — which remain brittle, with frayed edges and fading pigment — the exhibition features high-resolution reproductions. The originals are stored in protective archival materials, shielded from light and handling.

The exhibit itself is intentionally restrained. White frames and minimal text allow the drawings to stand on their own, without distraction. Visitors move from image to image, following the sequence Roux left behind.

For Afridi, the project is both scholarly and deeply personal.

“It’s almost like he was trying to tell his story the only way he could,” she said. “And that was through these drawings.”

Even now, questions remain. Little is known about Roux’s life beyond the camps. Researchers continue to search archives in France and elsewhere, hoping to piece together more of his biography. New leads have begun to surface, including connections to other families whose relatives were present in the same field hospital unit, according to Afridi.

The drawings themselves, however, remain the most direct record. They offer a perspective shaped not by hindsight, but by an attempt to capture what had been endured in real time.