Take a walk around North London's Gladstone Park, and you may stumble upon a group of five tortured figures.
Unveiled in 1969, the 'Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims Memorial' was Britain's first monument to the Holocaust and the work of a little-known German-Jewish artist who fled the Nazis and found refuge in West Hampstead.
Fred Kormis, who had traumatic personal experience of incarceration and persecution, is about to get the recognition he deserves in an exhibition that brings together personal artefacts and artworks - many not exhibited for decades.
The prolific sculptor, printmaker and portrait medallist had a career-long preoccupation with memorialising the emotional impact and human suffering of the upheavals of his era.
The exhibition at The Wiener Holocaust Library in Russell Square, Bloomsbury next month traces the émigré artist's life and career, as a Prisoner of War, a celebrated artist in Weimar Germany, and in London where he spent the final five decades of his life.
Fritz, or as he later called himself Fred, was born in Frankfurt Germany in 1897 and at 14 began an apprenticeship in a workshop specializing in decorative sculpture.
In 1914 he won a scholarship to the Frankfurt Art School, but as the son of an Austrian, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army when the First World War broke out. He was wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915 and sent to a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp.
This terrible experience provided the inspiration for much of his later work. Kormis escaped from the camp in 1920 and after procuring a Swiss passport in Vladivostok, returned to Frankfurt, where he earned his living as a portrait sculptor, and married wife Rachel Sender in 1924.
He was growing in renown In Weimar Germany with exhibitions in Berlin and Frankfurt, but once Hitler came to power in 1933, he was no longer allowed to work and his art was labelled 'degenerate'.
He and Rachel went to the Netherlands and then to England in 1934 where he anglicised his name, and held his first solo show at the Bloomsbury Gallery.
The couple lived in Broadhurst Gardens between 1935-1937 at a time when the streets around Finchley Road - dubbed Finchleystrasse - were populated with German and Austrian emigres.
He exhibited with the progressive London Group in 1936 and took took part in the 1938 Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries. At the time, he was living at number 9, Sherriff Road Studios, West Hampstead.
But in 1940 Kounis' studio, and many of his larger works, were destroyed in a bombing raid.
He settled at 3b Greville Place in 1944, where he lived until his death in 1986.
In 1941 biographer Philip Guedalla commissioned him to do one of the earliest medallic portraits of Churchill for his book. Unusually for Kormis, this was not done entirely from life - Churchill had to cancel his sitting in favour of a meeting with Roosevelt, and publishers' deadlines left no time for an another appointment.
Kormis also completed medallions of Edward VIII, Charlie Chaplin and members of the war cabinet.
His sculpture Angel Wings, sits in a quiet corner of Queen's Park and his other public commissions include 'The Shield Bearer' for the Corn Exchange, Stratford upon Avon and 'The Ever-Lamenting harp', Kiryat Gat, Israel.
But it was his memorial to POWs and concentration camp victims that he championed the most. Interviewed about the project by a newspaper, he explained that each figure illustrated an aspect of his war experiences.
“First there is the numb shock of realizing you are a prisoner in the hands of the enemy. Then there is the dawning awareness of your predicament and the primitive conditions. The next phase is the thought of escape and freedom. After that many succumb to despair and a sense of hopelessness. Others overcome their dejection and manage to escape.”
In a statement, dated 1947-1948 Kormis writes that the figures "intend to express four stages which I experienced myself and observed others to pass through. But far from me to pretend they were the rule which could be applied to all who were in captivity."
The First: In Stupor after Capture, The Second: Longing for Freedom, The Third: Fight against Gloom, The Fourth: Hope lost, The Fifth: Hope again.
"As far as I know no memorial exists in England, in remembrance of the sufferings and death of those who have not returned," he added.
The Wiener Holocaust Library display will feature personal records, correspondence, photographs, objects and documents from their archive, as well as artworks loaned from collections around the country.
Diverse work ranges from the woodcut prints he produced as a POW, to his medallions of leading figures like Churchill and some of his larger sculptural works.
Throughout his life Kormis created work which confronted the anguish of human beings taken captive. The exhibition explores an artist who devoted his life to using art to make sense of the experience of being a captive, a refugee, and an exile.
Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century runs at The Wiener Holocaust Library from September 20 until February 6.
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