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In February, 1943, eight months before she was murdered in Auschwitz, the
German painter Charlotte Salomon killed her grandfather. Salomon’s
grandparents, like many Jews, had fled Germany in the
mid-nineteen-thirties, with a stash of “morphine, opium, and Veronal” to
use “when their money ran out.” But Salomon’s crime that morning was not
a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely
personal. It was Herr Doktor Lüdwig Grünwald, not “Herr Hitler,” who,
Salomon wrote, “symbolized for me the people I had to resist.” And
resist she did. She documented the event in real time, in a