Helga Wolfenstein was born in 1922 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. When she was just three years old, her parents, Hermine ("Mina," née Bondi) and Dr. Bernhard Wolfenstein, divorced. After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Wolfenstein worked as a teacher for children who were forbidden to attend public schools under Nazi laws. Her older sister, Renate, married Dr. Fred Barber and the couple escaped to England in 1940.
Together with her mother Mina and her aunt Julia ("Ully"), Wolfenstein was deported to Theresienstadt in 1941. Mina was assigned to work as matron of the ghetto's Hospital for Infectious Diseases. Helga worked as a draftswoman in the Technical Department of the ghetto, where she met the artist and writer Peter Kien (1919-1944) and they fell in love. Her father and his second wife Aurelia were murdered after deportation from Theresienstadt to Sobibor in 1942.
Kien later saved Wolfenstein and her family from transport to Auschwitz in 1944. Before his own deportation to the infamous death camp, Kien gave Wolfenstein a suitcase containing several hundred of his works.
After liberation and her mother's tragic death from typhus in May 1945, Wolfenstein moved to Prague where she worked as a commercial artist. She eventually moved with her older sister, Renate, and her brother-in-law to Libya and then returned with them to London. In 1957, she married her childhood friend Eric (Kolmer) King and moved to Lake Worth, Florida, where she continued her work as an artist. In 1959, their daughter Judy King was born. Helga Wolfenstein King passed away in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2003.
After a two-year process during which Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, Director of the Museums Division Art Department, was in contact with the daughter of the artist, Yad Vashem acquired 142 Holocaust-era artworks from Judy King. The collection includes 110 pieces by Helga Wolfenstein King; 28 by Peter Kien; and four by other artists from Theresienstadt. On display are some 35 works, including a dozen by Peter Kien who had a strong influence on Helga's artistic development. This significant acquisition was made possible through the generous support of Barbara and Lewis Shrensky.
"It exceeds my wildest dreams that Yad Vashem, the most respected and respectful Holocaust memorial in the world, would own, conserve, protect and display my mother's Holocaust paintings and drawings," said King.
"I feel honored, grateful and amazed that at last, eighteen years after her death and despite a pandemic, the world will be able to meet my reclusive mother through her art and experiences and admire her talent and fortitude. I am very proud of her."
"Helga Wolfenstein King's extensive work, which she created during the Holocaust in the shadow of difficult years of persecution and death and in the face of the terrible tragedy that befell her family, is a testament to the triumph of humankind," said Vivian Uria, Director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division.
"The works of art created during this period are an expression of the need to give visual expression to the experiences of the individual – and no less, an expression of the sense of collective belonging and the desire to document and pass on the historical story to future generations. These important collections symbolize more than anything else the power of the human spirit that will remain forever free".
The Helga Wolfenstein King collection was acquired with the generous support of Barbara and Lewis Shrensky, Washington DC.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 96.
