The observer sees a close-up of the hanging feet of someone who has been executed. A faceless mass of people witnesses the anonymous death. The tattered striped prisoner's clothing sagging over the feet places the scene in a concentration camp.

The theme of execution belongs to a series of motifs with which painter David Ludwig Bloch addresses his experience of imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp in art. The weeks that he spent there immediately after the November pogroms in 1938 became the object of his artistic work forty years after his imprisonment. While living in exile in Shanghai, he did not deal with the Holocaust in his art.

"Never again" is the warning message of the 21 woodcuts and 50 blue-tinted acrylic paintings which were produced in America between 1977 and 1980. His work from this period all shows an explicit didactic purpose: future generations must be warned. In this series of pieces, Bloch depicts individual deportation and internment stations in the concentration camps. Although Bloch usually chooses realistic imagery, he also makes use of motifs from the Old Testament and of various allegories of death in his pictures.