12,000 came to see the original 1940 ghetto art exhibit

In the Łódź Ghetto, Jews defied Nazis through art. Now it is exhibited in Jerusalem

The second-largest city in Poland had a thriving Jewish cultural scene before The Third Reich incarcerated 164,000 Jews for slave labor. A Yad Vashem exhibit shows their resilience

In the fall of 1940, in the midst of starvation, overcrowding and fear inside Poland’s infamous Łódź Ghetto, a group of Jewish artists did something inconceivable: They organized an art exhibition.

The show, led by painters Yitzhak (Vincenty) Brauner and Izrael Lejzerowicz, transformed a commandeered room into a gallery displaying works created by ghetto inmates. Despite the dire conditions, thousands came.

“It wasn’t easy to pay the entrance fee,” Brauner later wrote. “The exhibition was displayed for six weeks, and 12,000 people came to see it. Porters, cobblers and peddlers, simple folk from Bałuty [an impoverished neighborhood in Łódź] about whom people used to say that art played no part in their world, they were the ones who showed great interest in the exhibition.”

That unlikely moment of cultural life under Nazi rule is now at the center of “A Shared Destiny,” an exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance center.

The exhibition, which will remain open for several months, explores how Jewish artists in Łódź continued to create, collaborate and document daily life even as their world collapsed around them.

“They protested the Nazi persecution by drawing to show what was happening,” said Orly Nachmani-Ohana, associate art curator at Yad Vashem. “Many were forced to produce propaganda for the Judenrat [Nazi-appointed Jewish council], but secretly they continued working for themselves, trying to maintain their identities.”

On the eve of the Holocaust, Łódź was a flourishing industrial city, Poland’s second-largest, where Jews made up more than a third of the 670,000-strong population. It had a rich cultural scene and a vibrant, tight-knit community of Jewish artists who continued to create even after the city was occupied by the Nazis.

The 233,000 Jews living in prewar Łódź had developed a network of schools, newspapers, and other institutions, and the artists that emerged from the community joined the two creative schools of thought that were dominant there at the time. The classical, traditional style was promoted and taught by Jewish painter Maurycy (Mojżesz) Trębacz, while the avant-garde movement — inclined to experiment with abstraction, expressive color, and fractured forms — was associated with the Yung-yidish artistic group.

“It was a very small, very intense circle,” Nachmani-Ohana said. “Everyone learned from everyone else. They were teachers, students, friends. You can feel that community in the works.”

Those relationships would soon be tested. Łódź was annexed to the Reich on November 9, 1939, two months after the German invasion of Poland, and persecution of the Jewish community and decrees against it were quick to follow. By the time the gates of the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto were closed on May 1, 1940, with some 164,000 Jews inside, dozens of artists were incarcerated in what would become the second-largest ghetto in all of Europe, after the Warsaw Ghetto.

During the more than four years of the ghetto’s existence, residents worked in what amounted to slave labor, even as dozens of artists were active in educational institutions, workshops, and a cultural center.

Some of the artists were brought to work in the Judenrat’s statistics department, producing propaganda material and publications combined with photographs and avant-garde designs. Meanwhile, they continued to paint scenes of the indescribable conditions of daily life around them.

As the war progressed, some of these pieces of art were hidden by members of the statistics department. After the war ended, survivors came back to retrieve them. One Jew, Nachman Zonabend, was notably instrumental in saving photographs, drawings, paintings and other documents from the ghetto when he was tasked with clearing the rubble after it was liquidated in 1944.

A virtual tour of ghetto life

The Yad Vashem exhibition tells the story of the Łódź Ghetto through the eyes of these artists.

A painting by Szymon (Szymek) Szerman depicts the moment of eviction of a Jewish family from their home, and their expulsion to the ghetto. In the center, the father loads their belongings on his shoulders, while the mother sits overwhelmed with despair, and their daughter tries to understand what is happening. The living room, in a state of disarray, testifies to the pogrom endured by the family before their expulsion.

Pieces by Brauner and Lejzerowicz depict the daily clearing of the ghetto’s sewage in a wagon, hauled out by a team of workers before dawn. This task became a symbol of the grueling physical labor the ghetto’s Jews were forced to perform and the degradation they suffered.

“It’s very humiliating work,” Nachmani-Ohana said. “You can see the suffering and the mass of action, the hard labor. They don’t show faces. It’s about the system of degradation.”

Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a classical painter who was put to work in the Department of Statistics, completed around a dozen canvases during the war, including a painting of the ruins of a synagogue in the center of the ghetto. Three houses of worship in the city were destroyed on November 15-17, 1939, and the ruins of the Wolborska Street synagogue came to symbolize the destruction of the Łódź Jewish community.

In her testimony after the war, Gliksman-Fajtlowicz related how important it was for her to draw and document scenes from the ghetto.

“The will to draw was so great that sometimes I would forgo my soup so that I could have some of those paints,” she said. “I don’t believe there is any greater sacrifice, as sometimes I was faint with hunger, but I still got hold of those paints.”

A monochromatic watercolor by Józef Kowner is stylistically reminiscent of pieces from Picasso’s blue period — but the resemblance ends at the color. A gaunt father wearing a yellow star sits with his children; the absent mother is felt more than seen. The children’s faces are drawn like adults, hollowed by hunger.

“They look like adults, even the youngest,” Nachmani-Ohana said. “You can see the misery. The blue can mean they had no paint — or that this is exactly the atmosphere he wanted to create.”

Across the room, a scene by Zvi Hersz Szylis shows a wandering musician with a small music box, a familiar presence in the poor Baluty district before the war and later in the ghetto. The figures are painted on rough, reused material, the pigments harsh and uneven.

“It should be something happy — a street singer, a performance,” Nachmani-Ohana said. “But it’s very depressing. He hoped for a coin, yes, but mostly, I think, they tried to bring a little bit of life into the streets. It’s joy under a shadow.”

The exhibition closes with images of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the controversial head of the ghetto’s Nazi-installed Jewish Council, and reflections on life in postwar Poland.

For Nachmani-Ohana, these works are more than historic works of art.

“These paintings are primary sources that tell us a lot about the people, the places, the daily life that were destroyed,” she said. “These works were an act of resistance in which these artists fought back the only way they could — by making art  together.”