(JEWISH GROUP) Holocaust victim's rescued artwork captures life in a Jewish ghetto

[Behind the Aegis]

Drawings that Peter Kien sketched when he was in the Theresienstadt ghetto
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE TIMES

Peter Kien knew what journey he was about to make. He had sketched the start of it many times, watching dozens, hundreds, thousands of fellow Jews being herded away for transportation, never to return. Before he too went that way, there was something he had to do.

Kien went to his lover, Helga Wolfenstein, and entrusted to her a suitcase, filled not with his personal effects but his sketches and writings based on the Holocaust he was enduring. He asked her to hide it somewhere in the Theresienstadt ghetto, about 40 miles north of Prague, and so she did. More than eight decades on, those works of art are being reunited.

Kien, one of the most vital artists to have depicted the Holocaust firsthand, is being celebrated at the Wiener Holocaust Library (WHL) in London, as it marks this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day. The library has just acquired a fresh archive of his artworks from Wolfenstein’s daughter. As the library was already in possession of some of his other works that survived, including an opera libretto composed and performed in the ghetto, Kien’s work can now be viewed in near totality.

“It’s an opportunity to reunite the artworks he produced in Theresienstadt with the writings he produced as well — material he had originally left behind,” Barbara Warnock, one of the WHL’s directors, said. “It’s been a long, laborious process, but finally the artworks have arrived and it’s very exciting.”

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