Groep mensen wordt door soldaten gewelddadig weggeleid 1920

This small drawing by Mihály Biró shows a group of people violently led away by soldiers, its story etched in strokes of black, blue and red crayon. It feels like a cry from the artist. He must have grappled with the terror, the injustice, working and reworking those marks to get them just right, feeling his way through each figure. I see a soldier raising his rifle as a man falls. The bodies are hunched, trudging forward, connected by their shared misery. Are they walking to their death? Someone hangs from a tree in the background, a chilling premonition of what is to come. The roughness of the crayon, the rawness of the lines, it's like a scream pressed onto paper. I see echoes of Goya's Disasters of War, a kind of lineage of protest. Artists bear witness, they carry these stories forward. It's up to us to listen.