In the fall of 1940, in the midst of starvation, overcrowding and fear inside Poland’s infamous Łódź Ghetto, a group of Jewish artists did something inconceivable: They organized an art exhibition.

The show, led by painters Yitzhak (Vincenty) Brauner and Izrael Lejzerowicz, transformed a commandeered room into a gallery displaying works created by ghetto inmates. Despite the dire conditions, thousands came.

“It wasn’t easy to pay the entrance fee,” Brauner later wrote. “The exhibition was displayed for six weeks, and 12,000 people came to see it. Porters, cobblers and peddlers, simple folk from Bałuty [an impoverished neighborhood in Łódź] about whom people used to say that art played no part in their world, they were the ones who showed great interest in the exhibition.”

That unlikely moment of cultural life under Nazi rule is now at the center of “A Shared Destiny,” an exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance center.

The exhibition, which will remain open for several months, explores how Jewish artists in Łódź continued to create, collaborate and document daily life even as their world collapsed around them.

“They protested the Nazi persecution by drawing to show what was happening,” said Orly Nachmani-Ohana, associate art curator at Yad Vashem. “Many were forced to produce propaganda for the Judenrat [Nazi-appointed Jewish council], but secretly they continued working for themselves, trying to maintain their identities.”

On the eve of the Holocaust, Łódź was a flourishing industrial city, Poland’s second-largest, where Jews made up more than a third of the 670,000-strong population. It had a rich cultural scene and a vibrant, tight-knit community of Jewish artists who continued to create even after the city was occupied by the Nazis.

The 233,000 Jews living in prewar Łódź had developed a network of schools, newspapers, and other institutions, and the artists that emerged from the community joined the two creative schools of thought that were dominant there at the time. The classical, traditional style was promoted and taught by Jewish painter Maurycy (Mojżesz) Trębacz, while the avant-garde movement — inclined to experiment with abstraction, expressive color, and fractured forms — was associated with the Yung-yidish........

© The Times of Israel