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Painter of the Holocaust

The latest exhibition in the cycle highlighting wartime and postwar art by Auschwitz prisoners is Painter of the Holocaust: An Exhibition of the Works of Halina Ołomucka from the Collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. Halina Ołomucka is an outstanding artist of Jewish origin. She was in the Warsaw ghetto before being deported and passing through several concentration camps, including Auschwitz (camp number 48652).

She was liberated near Mecklemburg, Germany, on May 2, 1945. She settled in Warsaw after the war and then moved to Łódź, where she studied painting under Władysław Strzemiński at the Higher School of Fine Arts. She moved to Paris in 1957 and followed the artistic life there before settling permanently in Israel in 1972.

Hundreds of her works, which have been shown in leading galleries and museums around the world, narrate events she witnessed with her own eyes and lived through in the ghetto and the concentration camps.

The current exhibition includes 71 graphics and paintings. Some date from the Warsaw ghetto and some from after the war. There are depictions of life in the ghetto (The Bunker, Women in the Ghetto, Umschlagplatz) and the concentration camps (First Steps in the Camp, Hunger, Soup, On the Wire, and By the Light of the Crematoria). Other works deal with liberation and the return to normal life (Liberation, She Survived, and Back to Life).

Hlaina Ołomucka’s works are on show in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Temporary Exhibition Space (Block no. 12) from May 5 to September 30, 2004, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The exhibition is organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Exhibition Department; concept and scenario are by Robert Płaczek.