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Catalogue information
LastDodo number
6291871
Area
Drawings / paintings
Title
Justifiable curiosity
Artist
Art object
Art Movement / style
Genre
Material
Technique used
Colouring
Dimensions
38 x 28.5 cm
Series / hero
Collection / set
Number
Addition to number
Year
1951
Country
Language
Details
Original pen and ink/pencil/crayon editorial cartoon drawing on art card, 1951, published in the Christian Science Monitor, shows the UN looking over the ‘iron curtain’ and a question mark representing the ‘inquiry into whereabouts of more than a million prisoners of war’. In 1950 the United Nations established the Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of War to account for and, wherever possible, repatriate all remaining POWs from World War II, particularly hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese. Seven years later, the commission admitted defeat. It blamed the Soviet Union which, contrary to its pledges under the 1949 Geneva Convention, refused to participate in this humanitarian endeavour. Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania also refused to cooperate with the UN commission. So 12 years after the war the German people for instance still did not know what had happened to more than 87,000 German soldiers whose presence in captivity in the Soviet Union at one time or another had been established, but whose subsequent fate was not known. Stamped on verso: “Used Aug 3 1951". Signed lower left, card size 38 x 28.5 cm, image size: 29 x 24.5 cm. Caption in blue crayon in upper border, in overall very good condition.