Fred Terna
Fred Terna was born in Vienna, Austria, on October 8, 1923, into an educated, middle-class Jewish family. His father, Jochanan (Jan) Taussig was from Czechoslovakia and had a doctorate from the University of Prague. Fred’s mother, Lona Herzog, was from Vienna; Jan met her while living there after serving as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. In 1926, Fred's younger brother, Tommy was born and, soon after, the family moved to Prague, where Jan worked in the insurance business.
Fred’s mother died of pneumonia in 1932. Jan never remarried but he and his two sons lived in close proximity to extended family, including his parents, Jenny and Adolf Taussig, who instilled in Fred a lifelong love of music. Their home had two pianos and bookcases filled with sheet music, and the children would visit every Wednesday, when friends came over with their instruments to play chamber music.
The Taussigs lived a comfortable, happy life until the rise of Nazism, which prompted Fred’s father to change the family name to Terna, thinking it would sound less Jewish. On March 15, 1939, the Nazis invaded Prague and immediately applied all of their antisemitic racial laws to the Jews in the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Fred and Tommy were kicked out of school and his father lost his business. The family’s attempts to leave the country were fruitless as they couldn’t obtain a visa and had no place of refuge.
Fred’s father made arrangements for him to live with false papers on a large farm outside of Prague. For the next year and a half, Fred hid in plain sight as the owner’s assistant, driving him around the area and serving as a bicycle messenger. In the fall of 1941, Fred’s father learned that the authorities were looking for his eldest son and sent word for him to return home to Prague immediately. He did but that evening, the Gestapo arrested him, tipped off by an informant.
On October 5,1941, Fred was sent to Lipa (known in German as Linden bei Deutsch-Brod), an agricultural labor camp run by the Gestapo of Prague. Fred recalled Lipa as a relatively “good camp” in that “nobody got killed there,” although the conditions deteriorated over time. In 1943, all of the prisoners – around 300 men – were transferred to Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt. Fred, now 20 years old, was assigned to the “hundertschaft,” a group of 100 prisoners tasked with whatever work needed to be done, from digging ditches and plumbing to painting. Whenever he could, Fred indulged his love of music, attending performances at the camp, which was distinguished by its incredible cultural life. It was at Terezin that Fred discovered he was an artist, initially drawing with scraps of paper and pencil stubs, sticks and dirt.
Fred’s father, then in his late 40s, was also sent to Terezin but transferred to work in a coal mine in the Czech city of Kladno. He contracted tuberculosis and was shipped back to Terezin, where he shared a small room with other sick inmates before being deported to Auschwitz. Fred later learned that his father was murdered in the gas chambers upon his arrival at Auschwitz and that his brother, Tommy, was killed in Treblinka in 1942.
In the fall of 1944, Fred was himself transferred to Auschwitz but he was one of the few, able-bodied people in his transport who passed the selection, and he was placed in the “gypsy” camp, known as Zigeunerlager. Near the end of 1944, Fred and some of his fellow prisoners were shipped West, to Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau. Fred did construction work there, building an underground factory for producing early jet planes, but it was a bad winter, the conditions were horrible, and Fred witnessed many of his fellow slave laborers die.
In 1945, as the allied forces drew closer, the inmates, at this point weak from starvation and disease, were forced onto freight trains. When Fred’s train stopped at a point due to American fire, he used a piece of shrapnel he had found on the ground to create an opening in the door, and pushed his friend from the camps, Tommy Mandl, out, then jumped after him. Walking East, in search of shelter, Fred and Tommy were captured by German officers and returned to Kaufering, where they were liberated by American troops on April 27, 1945. Fred weighed about 70 pounds and was hospitalized for some time before being repatriated to Prague as a Czechoslovak citizen. In the hospital, he recalls, a “friendly soul” gave him some watercolors and he “painted scenes remembering Auschwitz and other places.”
Back home, Fred discovered that he was the sole survivor from his family and that their apartment had been taken over by a Nazi official with ties to the new government. A family friend, Stella Horner, who was Fred’s girlfriend before the war and at Terezin, invited him to stay in her home, and they were married In 1946. Seeing that Prague was becoming Communist, the couple fled to Paris, where Fred took art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian. Stella, herself a painter, suffered from depression following her own experiences as a Holocaust survivor, and was later hospitalized on and off.
From 1947 to 1949, Fred worked for the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Paris before the couple moved to Canada, first living in Toronto and then Montreal. They ultimately settled In New York CIty in 1952, where Fred pursued a career as a painter. He and Stella divorced in 1975.
In 1982, on the way home from a support group for children of Holocaust survivors at which Fred had spoken, he met one of the attendees, Rebecca Shiffman, a doctor who went on to specialize in maternal-fetal medicine. Several months later, they were married, and they adopted a son, Daniel, in 1987. For over 60 years, Fred continued to paint, working out of a studio in the family home in Brooklyn.
Inspired by but departing from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Fred developed a personal style of fiery painting. His textured canvases, often mixing sand and pebbles with paint, seek to address the psychological space of trauma. In addition to art evoking his Holocaust experiences, incorporating charged symbols such as chimneys and ash, Fred created a series of paintings using circles as symbols of life’s continuity and representational works grappling with the biblical story of Abraham binding Isaac, among other themes.
During his lifetime, Fred lectured extensively and exhibited his work in several solo and group shows. His paintings are included in important collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem in Israel. Fred was also a beloved, longtime member of the Heschel Holocaust Commemoration Committee until his passing on December 8, 2022, at the age of 99. His son, Daniel, who graduated from the Heschel Middle School in 2001, before there was a high school, is a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography and video.
FRED'S ARTPRESS COVERAGE & PRESENTATIONSFRED’S NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY
Fred Terna penned a series of Notes for the Heschel Holocaust Archives. This is his introduction to the Notes, which can be found in full below:
My notes are intended as background to studies about the Shoah. Each note is a self-contained unit. When the context demands it I'm repeating some data. Quite obviously my information is fragmentary, and, occasionally, restrained. I have focused on recollections and family life before the Shoah, rather than on details about concentration camps. To this day I find it difficult to tell about events very much alive in my mind. Recalling these memories can be rather disturbing, and leave me upset for quite a while.
As of today, June 20, 2015, I have recorded twenty-eight sets of notes for the Shoah Archives. Some time ago members of the Shoah Archives Committee asked parents of Heschel students to record memories of their families. Many of these families included survivors of the events in Europe before and after World War II. This is my contribution.