A watercolor for the end of time?

Henry Simon (1910–1987) was a French painter who worked primarily in watercolor.

Captured by the Germans at Dunkirk in 1940, he was imprisoned in Stalag 1B near Olsztynek, in the Dresden area, in what was then East Prussia. While imprisoned, he continued to paint, producing, among other works, the drawing reproduced above, which was published, along with other paintings from that period (about 20 in all), in 1941, after the surrender of France, in a book entitled Compagnons de Silence. The drawing is titled Le Violiniste au Camp (Simon, in fact, was also an amateur musician) and dated, like the other watercolors, 1940/41.

Now, if we consider that Olivier Messiaen, author of the famous Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, also written in a German concentration camp and performed for the first time there in January 1941, was imprisoned in Stalag V111-A, about 200 km from Simon's Stalag 1B, but in the same area, we cannot help but notice the coincidence...

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