The eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War is commemorated by two paintings with the same title Buchenwald, painted by the classic of Czech modern art Emil Filla (1882-1953) in 1946-1947. They reflect on the time he lived in a concentration camp of the same name. The Gestapo arrested him on the day the war broke out, 1 September 1939, and his internment ended with the liberation of Buchenwald by the American army on 11 April 1945. In the first painting, Filla depicts a man in the throes of losing his human dignity, effectively on a par with the animals — in particular, a dog from whose mouth he is tugging a gnawed bone. The second work is based on the traditional motif of piety — the mourning of the dead Christ in the lap of the Virgin Mary. Impressively, Filla has heightened the drama of the scene, not only by using a wide range of colours but also by expressively deforming the figures and stylising the victim of the Nazi rampage — the dead son who turns into a skeleton in his mother’s lap.