“I’ll Finish Your Job”: One Woman’s Fight for Jewish Art and the Letters Her Mother Saved from the Nazis | UK News

TIt has survived the Nazis, been confiscated by the Communists, and for the past three decades has been closely guarded, bound by red tape, by a museum in the Czech Republic. Given the attention of overzealous Czech customs guards and the vagaries of the British weather, a happy outcome was in doubt until the end.

But last Thursday, a small suitcase filled with 681 drawings, love letters, poems and manuscripts created by Jewish artist and poet Peter Kane in the Theresienstadt ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1944 landed at Heathrow Airport.

From there, the treasures were transported to their new home: the Wiener Holocaust Library in central London, where Judy King, 66, was waiting impatiently. She was fulfilling a promise she had made to her mother, Helga Wolfenstein, on her deathbed in 2003.

Wolfenstein was Kane’s lover in the ghetto. He handed her the small, dark brown suitcase the evening before he was taken to the Auschwitz death camp, where he was killed at the age of 25 along with his parents, Leonard and Olga, and his estranged wife, Else Stranska.

Wolfenstein’s mother, Hermine, was head of the infectious diseases ward in the ghetto, and this is where they hid the suitcase from the occupying forces, correctly assuming that the Nazis would disapprove of the dangers of entering such a place.

When the rest of Theresienstadt was liberated in 1945, Wolfenstein left Prague for Libya, where her brother-in-law was working as a doctor for the British, before moving to England.

She knew that the Communists now in charge of Czechoslovakia would not let her take the suitcase out of Prague, so she left it with her aunt, Julia Flečerová. She could not have foreseen the deceit of a man named Karl Finger.

“Her aunt was elderly and had a handyman who discovered that the contents of the bag were works of art from the 1970s,” King said. “He was a communist informant and told the authorities that the old woman had something of value.”

Officials came to see the aunt and gave her a choice: hand over the bag and everything inside or face losing the pension on which her survival depended.

“She was heartbroken,” King said. “I wrote very tragic letters to my mother about having to give up her purse. That’s how the Communists took it away.”

When the Velvet Revolution ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989, the works and portfolio were transferred to the country’s Terezin Memorial Museum, a museum that commemorates those who died in the ghetto.

The staff asked Wolfenstein for permission to display the art, capturing the people and scenes of the ghetto, in a one-time exhibition and she agreed. But when I later asked for them to be returned, the museum adamantly refused.

“The Nazis were meticulous record keepers, but the Communists were terrible record keepers,” King said. “So the communists didn’t even write down my mother’s aunt’s name or address or anything from where they took the bag.

“The museum was like, you know, ‘Show us the source.’ ‘Why don’t you have a receipt from the camp showing that the bag was legally authorized and delivered to you?’” Naturally, no one had anything like that.

King added that Wolfenstein was passionate about the return of what was known as Bag No. 681. “My mother spoke seven languages ​​and wrote in English, Czech and German to museums and institutions around the world trying to get support for the return of her bag.

“People were sympathetic, but they weren’t willing to finance anything or put their name on it. I worked for 33 years to try to get this bag and its contents back, and when she was on her deathbed I made her a promise. I said, ‘I’ll finish your job.'”

King said her mother, who died at age 81, was almost obsessed with her mission. “Part of the difficulty was that she would begin her letters to the people of Terezin with ‘You thieves’ instead of ‘Dear sir or madam.’ I said, ‘Oh, I can see how they would want to help now.’”

In 2017, King visited the Terezin Memorial with her cousin Peter. “We talked to them and they said, ‘You know, we couldn’t work with your mom but we can work with you,'” she recalls. However, it took nearly a decade to bring the bag and its contents to the UK.

“They needed a lot of advice from the National Museum in Prague on how to do everything,” King said. “Part of the difficulty was that the artworks were considered national treasures, so there was enormous national reluctance to give them away.”

But the museum has come under pressure, with German writer Jürgen Sirk campaigning to abandon his works, while King – who was born in the United States and lives in Florida – has encouraged US officials to support her.

There were wrinkles to be ironed out. They said: I wish you had something with your mother’s signature on it that said she would pass it on to you. And I said, “Well, that’s funny you should say that, I have that exact document.”

“As a Holocaust survivor, my mother was very paranoid, and she wrote a document saying that the bags and the artwork were hers, that I was the sole heir to them and that they were my will. She dated it. She documented the signature and the date. So [the museum] He was satisfied.

“But it was still going on. At the last minute, the customs department said: ‘Oh, the handwritten document is not good.’ “It must be a court-appointed document.”

“Just this week, we thought all these efforts had failed, but our friend, who was coordinating all the efforts with the shipping companies in London and Prague, somehow managed to get things under control. Customs relented and the artworks left Prague. But then they had difficulty landing in London – you had a great deal of wind.”

King concluded that her mother — an Anglophile who worked at the Post Office in London and became a British citizen before settling in America — would have been thrilled to learn that the artworks had been donated to the Wiener Holocaust Library.

Howard Falconson, chief archivist at the London institution, said he was “extremely grateful for this wonderful donation” ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.

The documents join nearly 100 other of King’s works held in the library’s archives and smuggled out by King’s cousin Peter during the Communist era.