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 1942
On 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 wrote her last will and testament. The above quote reveals, in unsettling words and leaving no room for doubt, that she was well aware of what fate awaited her: murder at the hands of the Germans. At this significant moment – both for herself and also for her people – Seksztajn wrote these immortal words: her art works were to be bequeathed to "the Jewish museum that will be established after the war." In spite of the total destruction unfolding before her eyes, she possessed complete confidence that the Jewish people would arise from ruin, and that they would erect a Jewish museum where her paintings would find a home.
Gela Seksztajn’s last will is in fact that of all the artists who were murdered during the Shoah, and in its light are the artworks displayed in the Museum of Holocaust Art that opened in March 2005, built through the generosity of Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson as part of the new museum complex. The exhibition presented within this space gives tangible expression to the versatility and uniqueness of Yad Vashem's Art Collection that contains over 9,000 artworks, most of which were created during the Holocaust. In the ghettos, in the camps and in places of hiding, artists used their pencils and brushes – mostly unconsciously – as tools of defiance. They created art in spite and in the face of intolerable oppression, attesting to an astonishing phenomenon: namely, that artistic expression cannot be silenced, even in most horrific conditions. These artworks are an eternal verification to the German Nazi perpetrators that the persecuted Jewish people, labeled by them as subhuman, possessed the power of creativity – the tangible manifestation of the inspired individual.
Artworks in the Museum Collection have no common denominator except having been created during those years of darkness. Artists used their distinctive artistic forms and creative expression while their choice of topics varied greatly. The colors – at times astonishingly vital and bright – are a reminder that the Germans perpetrated their atrocities amid the mundane daily reality of the ordinary world. The artworks wordlessly relate the true drama in colorful guise: the natural world was not a black and white reality, it carried on in its usual course of vividness as millions of Jewish men, women and children were transported to their deaths.
Most of the artists whose artworks are on display at Yad Vashem were not given the opportunity to leave behind a written legacy; they were murdered, and their mute creations remained for future generations to ponder. How did artworks survive, while their creators did not? The annals behind the endurance of these artworks and their passage to Yad Vashem are fascinating and often dramatic. Each item charted its own unique route, but for a small number of multiple collections. The rescue of artworks from destruction is in some cases credited to the artists themselves, who took the effort to conceal and secret them away in safe places; others were salvaged by friends and relatives, who were committed to the cause of rescue. Many more works of Holocaust-era artists were revealed in attics and basements or in the hands of strangers; these, too, found their way to the Yad Vashem Collections. The small number of artists who survived reveal that the burden of memory weighed upon their creative efforts.
Almost 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, it would not be implausible to deduce that the task of collecting Holocaust Art would by now have been completed, and that it is time to progress to collecting postwar and contemporary art confronting Holocaust-related topics. Yet, surprisingly, hundreds of new artworks created in the very midst of the Holocaust have been added to the collection annually over recent years. Since the year 2000, in fact, over 3,000 new items have been incorporated into the collections, including works by Max Liebermann, Ludwig Meidner, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Bruno Schulz, as well as by less-recognized artists. The emphasis on rescuing and preserving Holocaust-era artworks remains thus relevant to this day, as the Museum lays the cornerstones for its collection of contemporary expressions on the Holocaust.
The last will of Gela Seksztajn and her brethren in fate has been fulfilled. A Jewish museum stands upon the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, and Holocaust-era artists have an eternal presence within its walls. Visitors to Yad Vashem are given an opportunity to see the Shoah through the eyes of witnesses, testifying with their brush, pencil and palette, and shunning words that fall short of describing the reality around them – and that is the source of the artistic expression.
First published in Yad Vashem Jerusalem magazine, #71, December 2013
