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Exodus. A Valuable Acquisition
The artistic collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum have added a painting by the contemporary Polish artist Maria Kantor-Lizuniec, a graduate of the Fine Arts Academy in Cracow who specializes in artistic weaving and easel painting. She has exhibited in Poland, Germany, Austria, France, Scandinavia, the USA, Canada, and many other countries.
Exodus, in which Kantor-Lizuniec expressed the pain of her experiences from the occupation years, is an especially important acquisition for the Museum, in terms not only of its great artistic and emotional value, but also of its historical significance—the painting represents an authentic event. During the war, Kantor-Lizuniec was a teenager living in Chrzanów (known during the occupation as Krenau). She witnessed the deportation of the town’s Jewish population on February 18, 1943.
The Jews of Chrzanów were setting out on a road from which there was no return—to Auschwitz. Among the crowd of people being led to their death, Kantor-Lizuniec recognized a woman who was a friend of her mother’s. The woman spotted her as well, and made a sign with her hand: a farewell gesture. The moment was so powerfully engraved in the artist’s memory that she resolved to capture it on canvas.
In the painting, in blue tones illuminated with inner light, we see a crowd of people in a shady mass, absorbed in themselves, walking through a murky city street. Although the event occurred at noon, the painting is plunged in darkness. This symbolic gloom expresses the deep pain and the helplessness not only of the victims, but also of the painter herself, who unwillingly became a witness to the tragedy.
Kantor-Lizuniec returned to those painful memories many years later, capturing with her paintbrush the fate of Chrzanów’s Jewish residents. She placed great importance on finding the proper place for her painting, which is why she decided to donate it to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, where it will commemorate the suffering of the millions of people who perished in the death camps and the concentration camps during the Second World War.
