FROM THE COLLECTION
A letter from Meyer Salomon Susan in Westerbork Camp, Barrack 72 to Mr. M. Polack in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Dated 31 December 1943.
ABOUT THE ARCHIVE
They Shall Be Counted
Order your own copy of They Shall Be Counted on Amazon today! The book features the Theresienstadt Ghetto Art Of Erich Lichtblau-Leskly, which are featured in our Temporary Exhibit area in the Museum.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER!THE HOLOCAUST SERIES
By Jack Boul
Jack Boul served in Europe just after World War II. He was profoundly affected by the unfolding stories of the Holocaust in Germany. Boul’s stark images of the Holocaust Series are his attempt to convey the horror of the concentration camps, and to memorialize this dark moment of recent history. The subject of the series is the nightmare of the Holocaust, but the more universal content examines man’s capacity of inhumanity towards other men. As with other important print series that focus on war, Callot’s Miseries and Misfortunes of War from 1633 and Goyas’s Disaster of War from 1810-14, Boul’s moving images both portray and transcend the historical circumstances to become a moving commentary on human suffering.
Watch a 5 minute video about the exhibit in the artist's own words here.
This exhibit is currently on display.
Erich Lichtblau-Leskly Collection
The Museum’s Erich Lichtblau-Leskly Theresienstadt Collection of original paintings or ghetto-picture diaries is the largest collection of this artist’s work. Through their technical excellence, the works reveal defiance, humor, satire, and indifference to the madness of the world run by the Nazi regime. Theresienstadt (Terezin), besides being a main incarceration center for the Central European Jews, also served as a place used to deceive the world that the Jews of Europe were alive and being treated well. The Nazi regime used it as a stage for filming propaganda and a tourist stop for international commissions. The Lichtblau-Leskly works capture the complications and ironies of Theresienstadt. They universally depict the fundamental desperation lurking in every moment of life in the show ghetto.
Erich Lichtblau-Leskly's artworks significantly differ from a ‘typical’ Holocaust graphic. Instead of a barbed wire, striped uniform, and death scenes, we see ghetto life through the prism of everyday errands and chores, depicted in grotesques and caricatures. Erich Lichtblau-Leskly convincingly challenges the Nazi anti-Jewish concepts by depicting and interpreting the ghetto life in a style he would use for a ‘normal’ commercial advertisement in his prewar practice. In the spring of 1945, Erich Lichtblau-Leskly cut most of his pictures into pieces to protect himself and his wife. Fortunately, his wife hid these fragments, rescuing them for posterity. Our Collection includes these fragments as well as re-created watercolors done by the artist in Israel during the 1950s throughout the 1960s when he changed his name to Eli Leskly.
This exhibit is currently on display.
