Felix Nussbaum (11 December 1904 – 9 August 1944) was a German-Jewish surrealist painter. Nussbaum's work gives insights into the essence of one person among the victims of the Holocaust. Early life and education Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück, Germany, to parents Rahel and Philipp Nussbaum. His father was a World War I veteran and German patriot before the rise of the Nazis. He was an amateur painter when he was younger, but was forced to pursue other means of work for financial reasons. Because of this, he is said to have encouraged his son to pursue art as a profession. Nussbaum was a lifelong student, beginning his formal studies in 1920 in Hamburg and Berlin, and continuing as long as the contemporary political situation allowed him. In his earlier works, Nussbaum was heavily influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Henri Rousseau, and he eventually paid homage to Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as well. Karl Hofer’s expressionist painting is said to have influenced Nussbaum's careful approach to color. In 1933, Nussbaum was studying under a scholarship in Rome at the Berlin Academy of the Arts when the Nazis seized control of Germany. When Adolf Hitler sent his Minister of Propaganda to Rome in April to explain to the artist elites how a Nazi artist should promote heroism and the Aryan race, Nussbaum realized that, as a Jew, he could not remain at the academy. Deportation to death camps The next decade of Nussbaum's life was characterized by fear, which is reflected in his artwork. In 1934, he took Felka Platek, a painter whom he had met while studying in Berlin and would later marry during their exile in Brussels in 1937, to meet his parents in Switzerland. Felix's parents eventually grew homesick for Germany and, against his fierce objections, they returned. This was the last time Felix would see his mother and father — the source of his spiritual and financial support. Felix and Felka would spend the next ten years in exile, mostly in Belgium, a period of emotional and artistic isolation for him but also one of the most artistically productive times in his life. After Nazi Germany attacked Belgium in 1940, Nussbaum was arrested by Belgian police as a "hostile alien" German, and was subsequently taken to the Saint-Cyprien camp in France. The desperate circumstances in the camp influenced his pictures of that time. He