Joseph Johan Cosmo Nassy (1904-1976) was a portrait painter and Holocaust survivor. He was born in Surinam to a father of a Jewish family that had fled Spain during the Inquisition.
He moved to New York City in 1919 to join his father. After finishing school, he went to England in 1929 where he worked as a sound system installer for a film company. He worked through Europe in similar jobs until 1934. That year he entered a fine arts school in Belgium. In 1939, he married a Belgian woman. As an expatriate, he was working as a portrait artist when the Germans occupied Belgium in May 1940. Two years later he was arrested as an enemy national (he had a US passport). He was detained for the rest of the war--part of the time in German internment camps.
Nassy was able to create a substantial visual diary of daily life in the internment camps and even was encouraged to teach art to other detainees.
Nassy survived the camps and displayed his works after the war in expositions of Holocaust art. Nassy separated from his wife in 1952. He died of cancer in 1976. He had no children. - Heidi Durrow
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience. Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog! Thanks for reading. And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Copyright 2014.
