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2012-01-25

An evening meeting in memory of Izaak Celinkier

Today, at 6 pm, the Historical Museum in Bialystok will stage an evening in memory of Izaak Celnikier, a renowned painter and graphic artist who died on November 11th, 2011, in Paris. Ewa Rogalewska, PhD, from the Bialystok branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), will talk about the artist and his connections with Białystok.

Izaak Celnikier, Korczak’s pupil, is a miraculous survivor of several camps and death marches. His life is a ready- made movie script. He was only sixteen years old when in November 1939 he and his mother and sister escaped from Warsaw and headed for Białystok, which was under a Soviet occupation at that time. As early as the age of fourteen, Celinkier made his first artistic decorative piece of art that was used while staging Aleksander Lewin’s play ‘Czy jutro będzie wojna’ at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage, where Izaak had lived from 1934 to 1938.

After Białystok was seized by the Germans in 1941, Celnikier lived in the ghetto, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop and in a studio of a German industrialist named Oskar Steffen. After the ghetto was liquidated, Celinikier was deported to Stutthof and later, in January 1944, to Birkenau. He was herded by Germans in the so-called death marches. At the final deportation destination, which was Flossenburg-Dachau, Izaak, wounded in the leg, fled from the train transport in April 1945. American soldiers found him on April 20th. In December 1945, he came back to Białystok with the view of meeting his loved ones but found a buried and dead town instead.

Source:

•Gazeta Wyborcza Białystok daily, Szukał bliskich, znalazł miasto cmentarz. (Jan. 25th, 2012)

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An evening meeting in memory of Izaak Celinkier

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