Articles Featuring Artworks from the Museum of Holocaust Art

On 25 January 2016, the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, German Chancellor H.E. Angela Merkel opened a new exhibition of artworks from the Yad Vashem Art Collection at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Jointly curated by Yad Vashem and the Bonn-based Foundation for Art and Culture, "Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection" was the first-ever art exhibition of its size and stature that Yad Vashem has sent abroad. The exhibition was on display until 3 April 2016."Through art we can feel the power and the suffering of human beings,"...

"It was between three and four o'clock, the date 11 April 1945. We waited in suspense and with unprecedented tension… Suddenly there were shouts, from the opposite direction, from the main camp… We rushed out to investigate: our compound was lifeless as before. 'Look at the gate!' shouted someone. I lifted my eyes and searched for the pyramid-shaped roof on the main watch-tower that stood out from beyond the main camp. The crooked cross of Fascism had gone. Fluttering from the symbolic flagpole was something white. The moment we had so anxiously been longing for had...

“This Judaism again I have come to accept with all my spiritual powers; to this treasure, which the most modern people neither know nor respect, belongs my innermost being."Ludwig Meidner, 1930The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 sealed the fate of avant-garde artists: their art works were declared "degenerate" by the newly instilled ideology as a defiling influence on the Aryan race, not least because this Art was viewed as having had Jewish characteristics.An exhibition under this very title was opened in Munich in 1937, aiming to incite German citizens against avant-garde...

As I stand on the border between life and death, certain that I will not remain alive, I wish to take leave from my friends and my works…. My works I bequeath to the Jewish museum to be built after the war. Farewell, my friends. Farewell, the Jewish people.  Never again allow such a catastrophe.From the Last Will and Testament of Gela Seksztajn, 1 August 1942On the precipice of death, amid the east-bound transports from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942 and only half a year before she and her daughter Margalit were transported to the Treblinka death camp, painter Gela Seksztajn...

The 1953 Yad Vashem Law, at the foundation of Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, affirms that amongst its tasks lies the commitment to commemorate "the valor and heroism of the soldiers, the fighters of the underground and the prisoners in the ghettos, as well as the sons and daughters of the Jewish people who struggled for their human dignity." In this spirit, four monuments were erected at Yad Vashem over five decades, the intent of which was to give presence to "Jewish heroism" on the Mount of Remembrance.  It is interesting...

Chaim Uryson was born in Slonim, Poland in 1905. When he was three years old, his family moved to Lodz. In primary school, his teachers already noted Chaim's special affinity for drawing and music, and Mauricio Trembacz, the lauded Jewish artist, became his mentor. In 1919, the "redhead with the beautiful eyes" joined the Yavne Gymnasium, where Zionism reigned supreme and most subjects were taught in Hebrew. In 1925, Uryson traveled to Paris and enrolled in the Art Department at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. To appease his parents, who were unsettled by his choice of a career...

"‘Immigrants,’ as we were coined, always seemed to me a mistaken denotation, as we did not leave our homes to find a new country to live in. We did not leave our country of our own free will... What we did was escape – we were ousted, exiled."Thus reflected Berthold Brecht on his flight from Germany in February 1933, similar to that of other German intellectuals in the wake of Hitler's rise to power in January that year.A photograph portrays a handsome man donning a fine sports suit, with an adorable girl wearing a dress typical for the period, the relaxed air of...

Over the course of eight months, from May to December 1943, Max Plaček – a prisoner in Terezin – drew over 500 portraits of artists, scientists, intellectuals and cultural figures that testify to the human richness of the ghetto’s population. The artist sketched his final portrait a week before he was transported to Auschwitz. In 1944, he was sent to Sachsenhausen, where he was murdered.In the Kovno ghetto, painter Jacob Lifschitz undertook documentation efforts together with artists Esther Lurie and Josef Schlesinger. At night, in the attic where he lived with his wife and daughter,...

"One, I never met my grandmother. Two, my name is Danielle Rina Cohen-Levy. Three, my grandmother’s name was Renata Braun, later Rina Levy. Four, my grandmother died at the age of 38. In 12 years, I will be older than she ever was. Five, she died of breast cancer. That’s why, every year, I’m being screened. Six, for forty years my grandfather kept a secret in his attic. Seven, everything I’m telling you here is the truth."These were the opening words of Danielle Cohen-Levy’s one-woman show, performed during a ceremony held at Yad Vashem in July to honor her...

When the national "Gathering the Fragments" campaign was launched, staff at the Museum of Holocaust Art imagined that the number of art works that survived the Holocaust would be small. It was therefore particularly gratifying to discover that survivors and their families have not only kept and cherished paintings and drawings from that time, but also believe Yad Vashem constitutes the designated home for future generations.Obviously, "Gathering the Fragments" does not end with the arrival of a work of art to the Museum’s collection. A process is thus initiated where shards...

The yoke of memory is borne by Holocaust survivors day in and day out. Over the years, they have unburdened themselves piece by piece: some by writing, some by the spoken word and some by means of the visual image, in art and in film. Each one has found a personal path to share his or her experience with immediate family, fellow Jews and others, wherever they may be. The unique commandment they were given – not on the peak of Mount Sinai, but in the depths of the abyss – is that of telling their story, as stated in Exodus 13:8: “On that day you shall tell your child” –...

The origins of this work of art are found in an outline quickly sketched by Felix Nussbaum immediately after escaping to Brussels from the French internment camp in Gurs. Here, for the first time, his Jewish identity takes central stage, after many years of addressing universal subjects. Marked as a Jew and denied his freedom, Nussbaum fully comprehended his Jewish affiliation. A universalist at heart who believed in the power of art, he was compelled to express his Judaism through this medium.The scene: a cohesive group of four men wrapped in their prayer shawls, standing in front of a camp barrack...

On the evening of 30 June 1941, the town of Drohobycz (in the Lwow district in Poland, now Drohobych in Ukraine) was conquered by the Germans, and a campaign of abuse and murder of the Jews began.Serving at Gestapo headquarters in the town was SS Hauptscharführer Felix Landau, who was assigned responsibility for enlisting forced labor from the ghetto’s populace. Landau ordered the Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz to decorate the walls of the local riding school.With the arrival of his children at Drohobycz, Landau instructed Schulz to decorate the walls of the nursery at his home, where...

Under assumed identities, a two-year-old girl named Ingrid Deutsch and her grandmother, Regina Braunstein, had spent 18 months in hiding with a Catholic family in Florenville, a town in the Belgian province of Luxembourg. The two had had no word of Ingrid’s parents, Fela and Carol Deutsch, for over a year. In the last postcard he sent, for Ingrid’s fourth birthday in the winter of 1943, Carol had written, “Father is very proud that his Ingrid is being such a good, sweet little girl. Love and kisses, Daddy.”  Carol and Fela were detained by the Gestapo and sent to the...

“I was in Juan-Les-Pins, near Villefranche, on holiday with my mother, in 1939.  We happened to meet Mrs. Moore (who was my godmother) in the street the day after war was declared.  Mrs. Moore said she was returning to the U.S. and would be glad to take me with her, to which my mother gratefully agreed, for my safety.  I was handed over there and then, in my bathing suit (and no clothes!)”So relates Valerie Kampf (née Page), in a letter to Yad Vashem that recollects her placement, at seven, with Ottilie Moore. Valerie was a British citizen, while Ottilie was a colorful...

On 8 December 2006, an exhibition entitled “An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak – 60 Years of Creativity” opened at Yad Vashem’s Exhibitions Pavilion, in the presence of Ambassador of Lithuania H.E. Mrs. Asta Skaisgiryte Liauskiene, celebrated author Amos Oz, renowned artist Samuel Bak, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Joseph (Tommy) Lapid, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev and Senior Art Curator of Yad Vashem’s Museums Division Yehudit Shendar.“The interconnected journey of the artist and his burden are not unique to the life of Samuel Bak,”...

“And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her; saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew: she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”(From “Life? Or Theatre?”, Charlotte Salomon, 1940-1942)The year 1940 caught Charlotte Salomon on the French Riviera, in the throes of a deep depression. Forced to leave her parents behind, she had fled her German homeland the year before and joined her beloved grandparents in France. But the Nazis had invaded France, and her grandmother committed...

Marking the historic UN resolution declaring 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in January 2006 Yad Vashem’s new Exhibitions Pavilion opened its second exhibition, “Montparnasse Déporté” (Montparnasse Deported).The exhibition opened in May 2005 at the Montparnasse Museum, Paris, in the presence of French President Jacques Chirac. Portraying for the first time in France the fate of artists of l’École de Paris (School of Paris), it focused on the lives and oeuvre of Jewish painters and sculptors who were persecuted and ultimately murdered by the Nazis...

A winter’s eve, 1943. In the basement of a house on Riga’s Valmieras Street, inside a complex that holds the German army’s auto repair shop, a Jewish prisoner sits for his portrait. Meir Levinstein movingly captures the unique moment in his book The Holocaust in Riga:  “We didn’t think of Arthur [Alter Ritov] simply as a talented artist, but as someone with a soul, more than just another prisoner. It was as if he had been sent to us for a purpose, to make us feel that we were still alive... and that the Jewish people still lived—and would do so forever.”Even...

After infiltrating the Vilna ghetto on a precarious rescue mission only days before its final liquidation, Jewish artist and partisan Alexander Bogen was plagued by a reverberating question: “What motivates someone at the precipice of death to engage in artistic creation?”An artist and a native of Vilna, Bogen neither forsook his artistry nor ceased to sketch the people, places and events he encountered following the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. However, it was only after returning to the ghetto in September 1943 that he began considering the wartime function of innovation: to transform...

Despite infinite risks and prohibitions, Jewish belief and practice persisted during the Holocaust, the dialogue with the Creator of the Universe never ceasing. Jewish observance was expressed in a myriad of ways—reflecting a variety of attitudes and approaches—and was tailored to meet the conditions imposed upon the Jews during that period. “Even in that inferno,” wrote Israeli author Aaron Appelfeld, “those of perfect faith remained steadfast in the beliefs of their ancestors.”Likened with these true believers are those artists who continued to create despite,...

Israel Alfred Gluck arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp towards the end of January 1945—one of 600 of almost near 4,000 evacuees to survive a two-week,
400-km journey from Jaworzno, the sub-camp of Auschwitz. The evacuees (the majority of whom were Jews) were taken by foot or open cattle-cars, during an especially cold and snowy winter, in one of the infamous Nazi “death marches.” These endless marches, endured by tens of thousands of prisoners, were carried out by the Germans under torturous and tightly controlled circumstances, following the liquidation of the concentration...

Me'er Akselrod (1902-1970) was born in a small town in White Russia. During WWI, his family settled in Minsk and there he received his art education from private teachers, as well as from the teacher of Marc Chagall, Yehuda Pen, in Vitebsk.  During the period of his training in Moscow, Akselrod returned to the small villages of his native area to draw the inhabitants and document their lives.In May 1941, his brother, the poet Zelik Akselrod, was arrested as an “Enemy of the People” and was shot by the Soviets during the retreat of the Red Army in the wake of Hitler’s...

“For the children of Ilya and Natasha—for all the children in the world—so that they will never be forgotten.”This is the dedication written by artist Zinovii Tolkatchev in his album Pirhei Auschwitz (Flowers of Auschwitz), published in the spring of 1945. The album depicts the children of Auschwitz, “the flowers of life,” as the artist called them as he encountered them on entering the camp with the Red Army unit that liberated the prisoners in January 1945. He captured the children’s images on blank forms found in the camp headquarters.  His empathy...

In letters he wrote during his forced exile in Scandinavia, the German playwright Bertholt Brecht complained about the sobriquet applied to people like him, who had decided to leave Germany upon the Nazi accession to power. “The name they coined us—emigrants—is fundamentally erroneous, since this was not a voluntary migration for the purpose of finding an alternative place to settle. The emigrants found themselves not a new homeland but a place of refuge in exile until the storm passes—“Deportees that’s what we are, outcasts.”

The last flamenco was danced by Catherina van den Berg behind the walls of the Theresienstadt ghetto (northwestern Czechoslovakia) in the spring of 1943. The statuesque, lithe, and very pretty Dutch-Jewish woman caught the attention of the Czech artist Charlotte Buresova when Catherina took her infant son, Clairence, for a walk on the main street of Theresienstadt. She had recently arrived in the ghetto from Westerbork (northeastern Netherlands), a transit camp for some 97,000 Dutch Jews who were being deported to Eastern Europe in 1942-1944.Catherina passed through the gates of Westerbork as a...