Chaïm Kaliski Exhibition. “Jim from Etterbeek.”

The eldest of four, he was born in Brussels in 1929, between the Midi station and the slaughterhouses, into a Polish Jewish family. His father, Abraham, was a leather craftsman, his mother, Fradla, a seamstress.

The occupation of Belgium in May 1940 upends their lives. After fleeing to France to escape the advancing Wehrmacht, the Kaliski return to Brussels, short on resources.

What follows is a miraculous bid for survival, as they slip past the checkpoints, denouncements, and the mass roundup in the Jewish quarter of Cureghem on September 3, 1942.

But Abraham is arrested on February 12, 1944. Fradla then manages to place her youngest children with relatives and goes into hiding with Chaïm, until the Liberation in September 1944.

For Chaïm, life grinds to a halt the day his father is arrested, a trauma he would relive for the rest of his days. It wasn’t until he turned sixty, in 1989, urged by his sister Sarah—also a painter—that he began to draw their story, a project that would consume him for eighteen years and produce thousands of drawings.

The line, at first glance childlike, is no less decisive: scenes of arrests and roundups that obsess the artist, who remained forever a “hidden child,” marked by the fear and anxiety tied to the images imprinted on his retina.

These heart-wrenching scenes, mostly drawn in Chinese ink, fuse text and image.

The works are “highly sonorous” drawings that evoke screams of fear, howls, the drone of truck engines, and the clatter of weapons during roundups, forming a whirlwind to which recurring refrains are added—obsessive, litany-like refrains.

The reader follows a Jewish community on the brink of annihilation through the conversations between the artist’s father and the acquaintances he meets during his wanderings.

The drawings by Chaïm Kaliski form the deeply moving chronicle of a Jewish childhood and a remarkably precise record of Brussels’ Jews under the Occupation.

A perfect example of outsider art, his work belongs to a man with hypermnestic memory, endowed with immense historical knowledge, traces of which can be found in the 120 drawings on display in this first monographic exhibition organized in France.