Artist who cheated Nazi death honoured

Marianne Grant escaped death by working for Josef Mengele

An artist who escaped death in a World War II concentration camp by painting for notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele has been honoured in Scotland.

Marianne Grant, now 81, researched and documented the experiments of Mengele, who was known as the "Angel of Death", while she was a prisoner at Auschwitz in Poland.

Her efforts to teach future generations about the horror of the Holocaust were recognised when she was awarded freedom of the district by East Renfrewshire Council.

Mrs Grant, originally from Czechoslovakia, moved to Scotland in 1965, settling in Newton Mearns, just outside Glasgow.

'I was petrified'

On Tuesday she recounted some of her painful experiences at the hands of Mengele.

Among the things I had to do was being sent to the dwarfs' camp on the sidecar of an SS motorbike Marianne Grant

"Among the things I had to do was being sent to the dwarfs' camp on the sidecar of an SS motorbike.

"I had to do the family tree of these people and show whether they were married or had any brothers and sisters.

"The next time he called me, he had an architect's tool kit and I had to draw that family tree again in a more formal way.

"Of course, he was walking up and down like a pendulum and I was petrified. If I had made a mess, I would have been finished but I was lucky, I made everything perfect."

Asked how she had managed to survive the camp, Mrs Grant said: "I was very lucky. To tell you the truth, I never was a big eater and food was obviously very scarce and I could probably cope with the little food you got."

In another incident during her imprisonment, she was saved from starvation by an SS guard she had befriended by producing a book of pictures for his children.

'Angel of death'

Mrs Grant, who is now a great-grandmother, was 17 at the time of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.

She managed to avoid deportation from the Jewish ghetto where she lived, but voluntarily went to Auschwitz to try to find her mother, who had been sent there.

Marianne Grant lived in Auschwitz for three years

She was a prisoner there for three years until liberation in 1945.

She has written a book on her experiences, called I Knew I Was Painting for My Life, and her artwork has been shown in two exhibitions.

A filmed interview about her story is shown at all Scottish secondary schools as part of the curriculum.

Mengele was given the name the "Angel of Death" because of the medical experiments he carried out in the camps.

It was Mengele who decided which new arrivals at the camp should immediately be gassed, who should be allowed to live and who should be the subject of his gruesome laboratory work.

Mengele, who was never tried, fled to South America after the war and eventually died after suffering a stroke while swimming in Brazil in 1979.