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With more than 12,000 works, the Yad Vashem Art Collection is the most comprehensive collection of Holocaust art in the world.
"But My Soul is Free"
100 Holocaust-Era Artworks from Yad Vashem Displayed in Berlin
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...
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Living with the Shadow, Creating with the Light
The Anguish of Liberation as Reflected in Art, 1945-1947
"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...
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"In Memory of Our Destroyed Synagogues in Germany"
“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...
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Fulfilling the Artists’ Last Will
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...
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In the Footsteps of Heroes
Monuments to Jewish Rebellion and Heroism at Yad Vashem
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...
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Two Portraits Reunited At Last
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...
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Portraits of Jewish Intellectuals on the Run
"‘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...
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Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity
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...
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The Freedom of the Spirit
Paintings by a Jewish Girl in Hiding
"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,...
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"A Unique Visual Diary of the Time"
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...
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Virtues of Memory
Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity
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...
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Camp Synagogue
Felix Nussbaum’s Famous Artwork Presented to the Pope
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...
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The Republic of Dreams
Wall Painting Under Coercion
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...
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From Father to Daughter: The Illustrated Bible of Carol Deutsch
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,...
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The Portrait and the Maiden
“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...
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An Arduous Road
Samuel Bak – 60 Years of Creativity
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...
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Charlotte Salomon: “Life? Or Theater?”
“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....
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Montparnasse Déporté
The End of L’Ecole de Paris
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...
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Unto Every Face A Name
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,...
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The Pen and the Sword
Jewish Artist and Partisan, Alexander Bogen
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...
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Brethren in Misery and Endurance
Religious Life Reflected in Holocaust Art
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...
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A Sketch of Gratitude
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.”...
Continue reading...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.”...
From Persecution to the Mass Murder - An Artistic Illustration
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...
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The Flowers of Life
“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...
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Felix Nussbaum: The Artist and His Family In Hopeless Flight
“Deportees, That’s What we Are, Outcasts” (B. Brecht)
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....
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The Last Flamenco
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...
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