300 works – watercolours and drawings of painter Gela Seksztajn were saved among the documents of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. The archives were hidden at the beginning of August 1942 when the Nazis commenced the mass murder of the Jewish community at Treblinka. Seksztajn’s works were recovered on 18th September 1946.
Gela was one of many artists who found themselves in the Warsaw ghetto. The vast majority of them perished and few traces are left of their work. The work of Gela Seksztajn is an exception. The aim of the exhibition is to highlight artistic creativity and its part in the struggle for survival and for human dignity in the extreme conditions of the ghetto.
This exhibition will allow for the presentation of the most valuable works, created both before the Second World War and those from the Warsaw ghetto. Her works show the variety of the literary–artistic milieu of interwar Warsaw and illustrates the fate of artists in the Warsaw ghetto. The exhibition of paintings is complemented by photographs, diaries and testimonies from the collection of the Jewish Historical Institute.