Disguised by the texture of bricks, hidden under bunks, carved into bedframes, and scattered across Nazi concentration camps and ghettos are the forgotten and unseen testimonies of inmates. Walls as Witness explores these inscriptions, drawings, and sketches bearing prisoners' numbers, names, cities, and depictions of various figures across major sites of the Holocaust, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Telling their stories, many for the first time, author Jennifer Putnam uncovers why and how prisoners wrote graffiti in the concentration camps and ghettos, offering a unique look into their daily lives, showing how they continued to leave traces of themselves, their lives, and their communities on the walls that imprisoned them. Organized by theme-time, identity, daily life, separation, place, and diversion-Walls as Witness adds critical nuance to our understanding of prisoners' experiences of incarceration and abuse, as well as that of their agency, showing how prisoners actively and purposefully interacted with the environment, often to their own benefit, through graffiti writing.

Featuring over 150 never-before-seen images of graffiti and wall paintings from one of the darkest periods of modern history, Walls as Witness presents the ruins of the Holocaust in an entirely new light.