The Life of Anton Witsel
Born in Amsterdam in 1911, Anton Witsel began working at age 14, selling newspapers in the streets. He had no formal art training, but drew obsessively- scenes of joy, daily struggle, and quiet faith. During the Nazi occupation, Witsel refused to sign the Aryan Declaration and instead used his pencil to record what others dared not see: hidden prayer, emptied homes, and a city holding its breath.
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He became the silent chronicler of a world on the verge of disappearance. His drawings capture a kind of sacred realism- not dramatized, not abstracted, but intimate and true.
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A Family of Memory
The Witsel Generations
Anton was not alone in his remembering. His son, Rob Witsel, and later his great-grandson, Morgan Witsel (b. 1988), inherited more than images- they inherited a responsibility: to preserve, reinterpret, and pass on the truths that art can carry. Through new works inspired by Anton’s wartime sketches, Morgan has continued the visual lineage of resistance and devotion. His pieces use color, abstraction, and modern technique to transform memory into a vivid, living language.
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This site is a bridge across four generations of postmemory. To remember is to reinterpret.
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''Legacy in blood, in pencil, in color''
Drawing Ritual Hidden Prayer, Sacred Line
Inside the clandestine synagogues of occupied Amsterdam.
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Witsel was uniquely trusted to witness and record Jewish worship during the war. He sketched Yom Kippur services, Torah readings, and prayer in secret homes along the Nieuwe Keizersgracht. His figures are wrapped in tallit, often drawn from behind, with the Torah clutched close- never for display, always for preservation.
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These drawings now serve as visual records of faith practiced under threat, and as a form of spiritual resistance through presence.
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Streets That Remember
Waterlooplein Urban Void
A vanished neighborhood drawn back to life.
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After the war, Anton turned his eye to Amsterdam itself. He captured the skeletal remains of the once-thriving Jewish quarter- Waterlooplein, Jodenbreestraat, and the homes that stood before demolition.
His booklet Waterlooplein 1964 became a visual protest against forgetting, capturing lost architecture as testimony.
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Where memory was being paved over, Witsel drew foundations.​
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''Inside the clandestine synagogues of occupied Amsterdam''
From Sketch to Colour The Annex Reimagined
In 1958, Witsel helped save the Anne Frank House from destruction. He drew inside the space before it became a museum. Decades later, Morgan Witsel reimagined these sketches in full color: Anne at the window, the iconic chestnut tree beyond, and the staircase that led to silence- all reinterpreted with modern reverence.
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These works form a rare intergenerational collaboration- a shared lens between the witness and the inheritor.
Anton Witsel
'' Not because of yesterday,
but for tomorrow. ''
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Public Memory Private Archive
From sketchbook to screen, and back to the city.
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Though never fully canonized in national museums, Witsel’s work has appeared in Berlin (1960), Oslo (1966), and Dutch television (1970). His archive lives in family stewardship, shared now as a digital trust- a return of memory to the people and streets from which it came.
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The Archival Bundle includes:
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Didactic object studies per archival unit
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A full research paper (CC BY-NC-ND Accessible)
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A bundled visual record of appendices
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Limited giclée editions to support the work’s preservation
1967 Painting
Anton
Witsel
Painting
The Prophets
In the 1960's, painting 'The Prophets' was Anton's magnum opus. He had been working on it for years. The prophets are grouped around the Ten Commandments in Hebrew letters.
At the top left is the woman (Marijke) as the creator/origin of life. To her right is Moses, the receiver and transmitter of the Ten Commandments. Below Moses the head of Jesus, below right a portrait of Karl Marx. In the bottom row on the left is the head of Mao Tse Tung, the great Chinese leader. To his right is Luud Schimmelpennink, one of the leaders of the Provo movement in the 1960s and creator of the Amsterdam white cart. On the far right is Ilja, the eldest son of Anton and Marijke.
A Museum Without Walls
This is a living platform. Add memory. Share knowledge. Join the record.​ What you see here is only the beginning. With every exhibition, every printed study, every conversation that passes through these works, the record deepens.
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Anton Witsel didn’t seek fame. He sought to remember. Now we remember him.
1944 Drawing
Anton
Witsel
Shelter Synagogue
After the 2011 restoration, Anton Witsel's two drawings were not hung back in their familiar place in the ma'amad. It took a while, but after a drawing was hung back a few years ago, the second drawing is also back in the ma'amd. Now I hear you thinking, drawings by Anton Witsel? What is this about? On the second floor of his house at Nieuwe Keizersgracht 33, Salomon Mendes Coutinho held every Shabbat and Yom to a minyan from the autumn of 1943 until the liberation on Shabbat 5 May 1945. The non-Jewish artist Anton Witsel (1911-1977), who lived at street level, made two drawings of these services. These drawings are now back in the ma'amad. They are dated 27 September 1944 (Kippur) and 8 October 1944 (Hoshangana Rabba). At Hoshangana Rabbah we blow the shofar during the hosha'anot. This explains why a shofar is depicted in this drawing. The Snoge shows that we survived the Inquisition. These drawings in the same complex show that we survived the Holocaust.