Richard Karon Wished To Be An Artist From A Young Age Growing Up In Poland

Richard Karon (left) in Europe with mates

 Born into a loving family of some privilege

On May 19, 1928 Richard Karon, was born, in the architecturally historic City of Czestochowa, Poland, (situated 124 miles southwest of Warsaw) to proud parents, Jan and Wladyslawa Karon (nee Jadczyk); the "Karon" surname, in Polish, would have been pronounced as "Karoin." He was the youngest of four children, having three sisters. His father had the qualifications to teach but he chose not to, instead working part-time as an artisan, crafting crosses and other religious icons, as a baker in their small family-run business, and as a hat-maker of some acclaim for both male and female customers, including unspecified custom work on regimental hats for the military. Young Richard would pick up many skills from his father, as he became a competent woodworker, in later life, making many of the custom frames for his paintings. He had worked in bakeries to make ends meet, and while working in France, had actually burned off his eyebrows being too close to the large commercial ovens. He had done a stint as a hat-maker after his eventual emigration to Canada. Wladyslawa, a well versed and politically active woman, who was allegedly very strict with her son, ran a well organized but loving home, and although there is some contradiction about living conditions, and family financial affairs, it would appear the family was well off, and may have employed a nanny to look after the youngest child.

Following the invasion by the Nazis, in September 1939, Wladyslawa was suspected of being linked to the Polish Resistance, and sent to a concentration camp which could have been Auschwitz, where she was executed with other political prisoners. There are conflicting recollections of this period, that the child had also been sent to a camp with his mother, and had been close enough to her, to have witnessed a Nazi guard kill her. We have been unable to corroborate this information, to this point. According to the artist's son, who heard the story many years ago, there is a version that suggests, the young man was told his mother had been executed, as hearsay, while he was cutting someone's hair, which he did proficiently to help raise money for the family. It does seem unlikely that the young Karon, (at eleven or twelves years of age) would have been returned to his community, after being at Auschwitz. It is more likely the case, he witnessed his mother being arrested, and forcibly hauled away by Nazi guards. There has been no date established as to when this might have occurred, but is assumed to have been early in the occupation, as dissidents, teachers, academics and those with political reputations were disposed of, by sudden executions in the city, in concentration camps, or death, the result of merciless treatment in slave labor camps. It might be the case, Wladyslawa was one of the 180 citizens of Czestochowa, killed on the first day of Occupation, September 3rd, 1939. The next day, September 4th, was known as "Bloody Monday," after the execution of 150 to 300 Jews by the Nazis.

Even before the invasion by the Germans in September 1939, there had been a prevailing anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe, and although it was most pronounced in Germany, the influences preceded the invasion. The Karon family, of the Catholic faith, probably would have experienced this growing hostility toward the thousands of Jews in their community, at the time, when of 28,500 residents, an estimated 30 percent were of the Jewish faith.

"After the German conquest of Poland, more than 1,000 Poles were taken from nearby psychiatric clinics to a wood outside of the Polish village of Piasnica Wielki, where they were shot. In October 1940, 290 Jews, old people, cripples, and the mentally ill from the Old Age Home in Kalisz, were put in a lorry to be taken to the town of 'Padernice.' No such town existed. Just outside of Kalisz, in the woods at Winiary, all 290 were gassed inside the lorry by exhaust fumes, and buried in the woods," wrote historian, Martin Gilbert, in his "Atlas of the Holocaust." One might imagine the young artist, and the Karon family, hearing the news about the increasing atrocities happening all around them, wondering how to escape the carnage as close as their immediate neighborhood. His mother, Wladyslawa, if her involvement in the Resistance Movement was true, the Germans would have had every reason to watch the family closely.

For an eleven year old, highly intelligent young man, who had come from a stable environment, and a good family home, it would have been unfathomable, to understand all that was going on around him. At a time in life, when it is impossible to truly appreciate the meaning of "death," the artist was thrust violently into the reality, that his family was in imminent danger of meeting this same horror, face to face. When Wladyslawa was arrested, because of suspicions raised by others, that she was part of the Resistance, it was probably assumed by his father Jan, that they would all die with her as a result. When she was executed on nothing more than suspicion, Jan Karon must have been petrified with fear, they would assume the family was equally involved in undermining Nazi authority. It didn't occur, but they certainly knew their actions and movements were being monitored. There were collaborators. Snitchers. There were those to trust, and those who would have turned in their own family members, to save themselves. When the younger Karon, made the decision to steal a loaf of bread, to feed his family, he must have also appreciated, from what was going on in their own neighborhood, that he could have been shot on sight. No trial. No necessity of explanation. His father would not have been able to do anything more than watch his only son die on the roadway by gunshot to the head. This is how stark and dangerous it was every day. Many were fatally shot, or beaten to death for crimes much smaller than this. The bread was taken by the soldier, who held the boy frozen at gun-point, warning him loudly that if it was to happen again, he would die as a result. There is evidence, however, the budding artist, would take many more chances during those years, up to and including his eventual escape from Poland years later, in defiance of increasing communist protocols…..and a fierce passion to find a better way of life.

During this time of unspeakable horrors, with both his country and Europe in the damning throes of war, Richard Karon worked away at his art, when not trying to earn money, cutting hair for neighborhood residents. He kept a small number of postcards the family had been sent, and those he could secure off neighbors, and he sketched with a pencil, those scenes and buildings photographed on the correspondence. He had classroom instructors, and others with artistic talent, who helped him refine his drawings, which he pursued continually, possibly as a means of distraction from the tragic events unfolding. It is known, that he would set up his chair, near their home, and adjacent to the train tracks, and many times, he had the tragic opportunity to witness the frequent, jammed freight cars of polish prisoners, and Jews, being transported to either the Warsaw ghetto, or to slave labour, or death camps. He admitted to friends, over his lifetime, how horrible it was to hear the screaming and cries for help; the requests for food and water, made of the clusters of curious onlookers, who stood along those rail lines, watching history in the making. In 1942, at the age of 14, he became an adult. He had seen and witnessed too much tragedy, to dwell in the innocence of childhood any longer. From the age of eleven, the Nazis had created a hardened, resilient, resourceful young man, who was quite capable of taking care of himself, and helping his family survive. It must have been so difficult for him, later in life, to have looked upon his own son, and his family's comfortable circumstances in Canada, and thought about how his mother and father had prayed to God, that they might survive just one more day, with the sound of gunfire echoing through the tortuous hours. How angry he must have been, to have lost those years of nurturing and security, because it was all, as if a glass pane, precariously placed, such that even the air itself, might have shattered it to pieces. He may have wanted to scream along with those Jewish prisoners, crowded into the locked freight cars, passing day and night, because as those crowds of witnesses talked, and shared the knowledge they had picked up on the streets…..it was known, the place they were being taken by rail, had no exit for the living.

Did he have flashbacks to his native Poland, when walking in the forest with his son, at their home / studio in Muskoka, thinking about the children who had been forcibly separated from their parents, as he had been from his own mother? Could he get the images out of his head, having watched in silence, as Nazi soldiers ran after, and then shot, children fleeing confinement? How could he not think of this, or have flashbacks, as he had never dealt with those years, other than, like many other survivors, having locked the memories away, refusing to deal with them. But it wasn't at his discretion, and during biographical research, it was noted by his friends, colleagues and family, that he was habitually moody, and could become angry quickly, by circumstance, retaliating over what most felt were small and insignificant issues. When on his own, at the studio, one day, friends nearby invited him over for supper. He took it that the neighbor couple believed he was incapable of looking after himself. "I can cook you know," he responded, and rejected the invitation.

His moods were unpredictable and could change suddenly, seemingly without provocation, that only a very few knew how to navigate successfully. His idiosyncrasies and unspecified depression, would ultimately destroy several marriages, one of them being common-law. Karon told his second wife, Irma, that there had been a problem with alcoholism that created serious tension in his first marriage. Not only was he a mood-driven artist, with all the frustrations a painter encounters of repeated trial and error, it was obvious to those close friends, and his second wife Irma, that whatever haunted him, was too deeply seeded, too profoundly rooted in his soul, to resolve, without his own willingness to seek help. He never admitted this, or that he needed assistance, as he had always dealt with the rigors of survival on his own. He saw himself, rightly, as a survivor. One might suppose he assumed that how he won-out over oppression, in Poland, and earned his freedom through courageous escapes, numerous times, that nothing on a domestic level, would or could defeat him. His conviction that he was a life-survivor had its flaws. He couldn't oppress his family, as his wife wouldn't tolerate it, and he could not suppress the cancer in his lungs. Art as life, life as art, not everything could be neatly framed for convenient viewing. Yet anyone looking back upon the circumstances of his early days, as a young man in Poland, might forgive him for having a jaded view of Christian values, and fairness in life. After a lengthy hiatus from the church, it is known that in the final tumultuous years, having lost his marriage, and custody of his son, Richard Jr., and knowing he had a mortal illness, the artist did return to his faith, in the final years of his life, and following his death, was buried in a Catholic Cemetery in Richmond Hill.

"In the Volhynia over 87,000 Jews were murdered in August 1942. As German units came to kill them, as many as 15,000 managed to escape. But less than 1,000 of the escapees, who included men, women and children, were able to survive nearly two years of intense hunger, severe winter cold, sickness, and repeated German and Ukrainian attack. Some of the men later joined the small Soviet partisan units which were later parachuted into the Volhynia," notes Martin Gilbert. "Between May and December 1942 more than 140,000 Volhynia Jews were murdered. Some, who had been given refuge in Polish homes, were murdered together with their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when of 300,000 Poles in the Volhynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukranian 'bandits'. In many villages, Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe." It was news received throughout the occupation. Of this there was no escape. There is evidence however, the artist as a young man, mounted many daring travels during this period, and immediately after the war, crossing half-frozen rivers, and snow-laden countryside, to find out for himself what was going on in his country, slipping into Germany and Russia on occasions, with a number of equally courageous friends, including at least one German-born young lady. He knew how to evade detection, and he was highly skilled at escaping his oppressors when he felt the need for even temporary liberation. It was too early in his young life, to know what living in Canada would represent of freedom desired.

"Throughout Europe, the traveller to this day comes across monuments and gravestones to the victims. Stones mark the mass graves of individuals of whom nothing will ever be known; not their names, their ages, their birthplace, nor indeed their total number." (Martin Gilbert, "Atlas of the Holocaust," 1982, Michael Joseph Limited, London). If you would like a copy of this book, please consult the dealer collective, of the Advanced Book Exchange, through their online directory. You will be able to type in the author's name and book title, to find what and where copies are currently available.