POLIN Museum collection: Elżbieta Nadel, Images from Home. 18 sketches, Lwów 1942

Images from Home. 18 sketches, Lwów 1942 by Elżbieta Nadel (Elisheva Landau) is a unique artistic testimony that enriched the POLIN Museum collection.

Elżbieta Nadel (in Hebrew: Elisheva Landau) was born in 1920 in Lwów. She studied at the local Institute of Fine Arts, her parents were medical doctors. After the Germans entered Lwów in 1941, her whole family was forced to move into the ghetto.

It is precisely this ghetto existence that served as the canvas for Images from Home - the impoverishment, cramped living conditions where a small space served as a living-room, a kitchen, a doctor’s surgery and a bedroom; permanent fear and hopelessness. Elżbieta’s defence mechanism when faced with the grim reality was humour and irony.

The Images from Home collection is not merely a great work of art - it is also an account, a report and a testimony on the Holocaust.

Having fled the ghetto, Elżbieta and her mother were hiding in Warsaw. After the war she emigrated to Israel where she worked as a graphic artist and book illustrator until her passing in 1994.

The purchase was made possible thanks to a grant from the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute