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2010-08-18

La Memoire Gravée

Ilustracja

Izaak Celnikier, Shoah    

There is an exhibition of Izaak Celnikier’s drawings in the city hall of Białystok (the main premises of Podlaskie Museum). Murky works present the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.

Izaak Celnikier was born in 1923 in Warsaw. He lived in the Janusz Korczak’s orphanage between 1934 and 1938. He moved to Białystok in November 1939. He was sent to the ghetto in July 1941. Later he was deported to the extermination camps in Stutthof and Auschwitz. He managed to get out of the transport to Dachau in April 1945, however, he was kept by Soviets and then arrested. He escaped from a Soviet camp and came back to Białystok thanks to Caritas.

He studied art in Prague. He started making his drawings in 1968, after anti-Semitic incidents in Poland and the pacification of Czech Republic. A series of 24 drawings “La Memoire Gravée”, (“Wyryte w pamięci”) was published in Paris in 1990. Thanks to Podlaskie Museum’s efforts they were sent to Białystok.

Murky works present the incidents experienced by Celnikier: burning down the synagogue in Suraska Street, when 800 Jews died in the fire; the liquidation of the ghetto carried out in February 1943, when about 1000 people were killed on the streets and 10 000 were deported to the extermination camp in Treblinka. His work “Masacre of 16th of August” (“Masakra 16 sierpnia”) is very important in context of the celebrations of the 67th anniversary of the Jewish uprising in Bialystok ghetto.

The artist documents not only the Holocaust in Białystok but also the details of barbarian Nazi’s behavior in extermination camps – shaving, tatooing, selections, etc. Moreover, he meaningfully presents the death of his tutor Janusz Korczak.
 

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