Exhibition "The Bird-Cage"

Josef Nassy (1904-1976), born Joseph Johan Cosmo Nassy in Parmaribo, Suriname (Dutch Guiana) of Jewish descent, trained as an electrical engineer in New York City from 1919. Before leaving for England in 1929 for work, he thought U.S. citizenship might be useful in Europe and, using the name Josef Nassy, ​​born in San Francisco in 1899, applied for a U.S. passport without further investigation after all public records were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

In England, he worked for a film company that installed sound systems during the transition from silent to talkies. As part of this activity, Nassy was posted first to Paris in 1930, then to Belgium.

In 1934, Nassy decided to turn to painting and was accepted into the Royal Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in Brussels. In 1939, he married a Belgian woman and earned his living as a portrait artist. Despite the occupation of Belgium by Nazi Germany in May 1940, Nassy and his wife remained in the country. With the entry of the United States into the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Nassy was considered an enemy citizen by the German occupying forces because of his American citizenship and was arrested on April 14, 1942. He first spent seven months in the Beverloo transit camp and was then transferred to the Ilag VII internment camp in Laufen Castle, where he remained, with few interruptions in the Tittmoning subcamp, until his liberation by American troops on May 4, 1945.

During the approximately two and a half years of his imprisonment, Nassy created a kind of diary with over two hundred drawings, documenting the people and life in the internment camp. Nassy was able to save all of his works created in Ilag VII and, upon returning to Belgium, held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1946. Josef Nassy continued to paint and draw until his death in 1976.

The fact that at least some of Josef Nassy's work has been preserved for posterity is thanks to the US businessman, art collector, and philanthropist Severin Wunderman (1939–2008), who acquired a large part of the Nassy collection in 1984 and donated the works to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., in 1992. As a result, many of these drawings were archived and made available online.