Emmanuel de Roux
While working as an art teacher in his home town of Drohobycz in 1942, the prominent Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz was asked by Felix Landau, an SS officer, to decorate his children’s bedroom with frescoes. It was a request that Schulz was not in a position to refuse.
The frescoes were recently rediscovered by the film director Benjamin Geissler and his father, Christian, when they were making a film about Schulz, who was born in Drohobycz in 1893, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The town, a centre of the east European Jewish diaspora, was incorporated into Poland after the first world war. It is now the Ukrainian town of Drogobich.
The frescoes, each measuring about 100cm x 150cm, illustrated fairy stories, and depicted a princess, a dwarf, a dancer, a flute-player and a monster. They had been painted over several times. As the frescoes were being restored by experts from museums in Warsaw and Lviv, the walls on which they were painted were removed by emissaries from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and secretly taken to Israel on May 21, according to Polish press reports.
Yad Vashem says “the frescoes by the Jewish artist Schulz” were “given” to the institute by the current owners of the house, with the agreement of the local authorities. But on June 6 the Polish president, Alexander Kwasniewski, strongly condemned the methods use by Yad Vashem.
The Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza published an open letter from Dora Katznelsonde, vice-president of the Jewish community of Drogobich, to the Israeli culture minister and the head of Yad Vashem. “We Polish Jews, who have remained on the blood-soaked land of our fellow citizens, wish to preserve traces of the great and unique culture created by Jews living in Ukraine,” she wrote.
Kwasniewski says he has spoken to the Israeli ambassador in Warsaw, Shevah Weiss, about the affair, and Poland will take steps, in collaboration with Ukraine, Israel and Yad Vashem, to ensure that “this kind of heritage, which testifies to the Jewish presence and to Jewish culture, especially in Ukraine, is protected”.
Schulz moved in Polish avant-garde circles, where he became acquainted with the flamboyant novelist, playwright and painter Stanislaw Witkiewicz. But his closest friend was the novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz.
In 1933 Schulz held exhibitions of his drawings and engravings in Warsaw. They were not greatly appreciated. They depict the Jewish communities of small towns in eastern Poland.
The atmosphere they evoke is oppressive, fraught and occasionally comical. In them Schulz often portrays himself as an ugly man in disturbingly erotic situations.
This fantastic, pseudo-caricatural world is also to be found in his collections of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sana- torium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1936).
On November 19 1942 Schulz was shot in the back of the head by another SS officer, Karl Gnter, “who was annoyed because Landau had just killed his Jewish dentist”, according to Christian Geissler.