Suitcase #681: Rare Nazi ghetto drawings in London Holocaust archive
Cache of almost 681 artworks by Czech Jewish artist and playwright, Peter Kien, created secretly while he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt
Drawings created by a renowned Czech artist in a Nazi ghetto have been deposited in the archive of the Wiener Holocaust Library, after a 55-year effort to bring it to the UK.
The cache of almost 700 artworks by Czech Jewish poet, artist and playwright, Peter Kien, was created secretly while he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt.
The artworks themselves show snippets of life under unthinkable conditions, including portraits of fellow residents and scenes of the ghetto’s defiant cultural life, which in many cases are the last fragments of people who would be murdered in the following months and years.
Kien himself was killed in 1944, along with his parents, at only 24 years old.
The Wiener Holocaust Library already holds key documents relating to his work (including a rare original opera libretto).
Helga Wolfenstein, who became Kien’s partner in the ghetto, hid the artworks from SS guards for the remainder of the war in a suitcase in the infectious diseases wing of the ghetto hospital where she worked, correctly believing they wouldn’t look there.
Wolfenstein survived the War; her daughter, Judy King, made the donation of Kien’s works this month.
The story of the portraits’ survival in the post-war period includes the usurping of the collection by the Communist Czech government in the 1970s, and the onset of a more than five-decade fight by Helga, and then Judy, to reunite the artworks with the existing collection at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, where they will be held in its archive – the oldest repository of Holocaust-era materials in the world, preserved, stored, and made available to researchers worldwide.
Interim co-directors of the Wiener Holocaust Library, Dr Christine Schmidt and Dr Barbara Warnock, said: “We’re proud to receive this remarkable acquisition of artworks to our archive, and to integrate them into our existing collection on Peter Kien’s life. Our efforts to now conserve and digitise the drawings will ensure these fragile works can be interpreted as crucial historical evidence and inform our future public outreach, education and exhibition programmes.”
Describing the impact of her donation to the Library, Judy King said: “Between the ages of 19 – 23 my mother, Helga Wolfenstein King, was an inmate at the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. She left the camp with suitcase #681 that her soulmate Peter Kien gave her on the eve of his deportation to Auschwitz. It was filled with poems, manuscripts, and drawings by Peter and drawings by other artist inmates.
“Finally, Peter’s poems, manuscripts, and love letters to my Mother have now been donated to the Wiener Holocaust Library. It has taken 55 years for her, then me to enable this restitution from Czechia of Communist-usurped suitcase #681 and its artworks.
“I am thankful to God that the day of transfer is finally close at hand. I will finally fulfil the deathbed promise I made to my Mother to recover her cherished property.”