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| Bruno Schulz |
Murals illuminate Holocaust legacy row
Israel has taken the last work of a young Polish Jew from a town now in Ukraine
Ian Traynor in DrogobychMon 2 Jul 2001 09.45 BST
When the Nazis massacred 230 Polish Jews in the ghetto of Drogobych on a cold November day in 1942 the Gestapo agent Karl Günter gained particular notoriety.
His victims that day included two young women and the writer Bruno Schulz, whose slim literary output evokes a magical, grotesque place and era which vanished in the Holocaust.
The Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski describes Schulz's murder in Imperium, his travelogue of the disappearing Soviet Union, published in 1998.
"Pilgrimages are made to Drogobych because this is where the writer Bruno Schulz lived, created, and died," Kapuscinski wrote. "On the street Karl Günter, a Gestapo agent, shot Bruno Schulz. Günter had a small woman's pistol."
Almost 60 years after what became known locally as "Black Thursday", Schulz and his madcap depictions of Drogobych life have come back to haunt this pretty, provincial town. It was in Poland between the wars, and is now in Ukraine, and has a vibrant history of central European Jewish culture and its counterpoint of visceral anti-semitism.
When he died Schulz, who taught drawing at the local boys' high school was painting fairytale scenes on the walls of the bedroom occupied by the five-year-old son of the town's Gestapo chief.Long sought and then forgotten, the murals were found in February under the peeling pink emulsion in the pantry of a flat belonging to a retired Russian communist party apparatchik.
Within months they were gone: lifted from the walls and taken to Israel. Their removal caused an outcry and an anguished debate about ownership patrimony of the legacy of Jews lost in the Holocaust.
"The Israelis say the paintings belong in Israel. The Poles say they should be in Poland. But the authentic place for these paintings is Drogobych," Benjamin Geissler, the Hamburg film-maker who found them, said.
Alfred Schreyer, an elderly Holocaust survivor, retired violinist and former pupil of Schulz pupil, agrees.
"Schulz was born here, he worked here, he lived here, he died here. These paintings should remain here," he said.
Mr Schreyer's father was gassed by the Nazis at Belzec in Poland, his mother was shot in the forest outside Drogobych, and he himself ended the war in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Alerted to Geissler's discovery, experts from Yad Vashem, Israel's central Holocaust memorial and museum, arrived quietly in Drogobych in March to examine them, aided by Mark Shraberman, a Ukrainian Jewish archivist who worked in the regional capital, Lviv, before emigrating to Israel in the 90s.
They returned in May, got access to the pantry, painstakingly prised the murals from the wall, and spirited them away to Israel.
"It must be emphasised that Yad Vashem worked openly and with the full coordination of the local authorities," Yad Vashem said in a statement.
The Poles, who regard Schulz as a great Polish writer, are livid.
The Ukrainian secret police are investigating. The Ukrainian government has lodged protests with the Israeli government, which has not replied.
Schulz's reputation as a pioneer of Polish modernism rests on two small volumes of short stories published in the 30s: The Street of Crocodiles, also known as Cinnamon Shops, and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.
He was also a prolific caricaturist and painter: more than 300 of his works are on display in a Warsaw museum.
"This flat was privatised, it's our property, we can do what we want," Nadezhda Kaluzhnaya said
"No one told us these paintings were valuable. They're not even paintings, just smears on the wall.
"It would be different if they were frescoes, Italian, Michelangelo or something."
The five fragments of mural depict a princess, two dwarves, a horse and carriage: scenes from Grimms' fairytales painted on the orders of Felix Landau, the Austrian Nazi and war criminal who oversaw the murder or deportation of 15,000 Drogobych Jews under the Third Reich.
"The coachman in the carriage has the face of Schulz himself," Mr Schreyer said. "That's characteristic. He often puts himself in his paintings."
Landau, a junior SS officer, was a notorious sadist with a penchant for the fine arts.
He was convicted as a war criminal in post-war Germany and released after serving 15 years of a life sentence. He died in 1983 in his native Vienna.
The 100-year-old villa where the Kaluzhnys live was the police headquarters when Warsaw ruled here between the wars. It became Landau's home when the Nazis took over in 1941.
Some say a famous scene from Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is based on Landau's bestiality in Drogobych: from the villa balcony, he would amuse himself by taking pot shots at Jewish slave labourers working in the orangerie across the street.
And when the Nazi looting of Drogobych was in full swing, he needed a local Jew "with perfect written and spoken German" to catalogue the art works and valuables being plundered.
Schulz fitted the bill. He survived a little longer by being given a German pass enabling him to move in and out of the ghetto.
When Landau learned that he was also a painter, he commissioned Schulz to decorate the walls of the nursery of his son Wolf-Dieter.
But Landau's subordinate Günter nursed a grudge against his boss for shooting a Jewish man Günter employed as his private dentist. Günter took his revenge by killing his boss's painter.
The former nursery is now a tiny storage room off the Kaluzhnys' kitchen, where Mrs Kaluzhnaya keeps her pickles and garlic, and fruit and vegetables from the garden.
"I got a phone call from Kaluzhny on May 23," Mr Schreyer said. "It was an idiotic conversation.
"Kaluzhny said: 'I've given them the frescoes.' I said: 'How could you do that?'
"If he'd called me a day earlier, I would have made sure they wouldn't have got across the Ukraine border with them.
"I said: 'They probably paid you a lot of money.' He said: 'Not a kopeck.'"
According to the Kaluzhny family, the Israelis originally offered $3,000 (£2,140) for the Schulz works. Local rumour has it that they got $100.
But Larisa Artemchenkova, their daughter, insists that they gave away the murals for nothing.
"We just wanted to be left in peace. There was talk of making a Schulz museum here, and where would my elderly parents go then?"
She then offered an inspection of the pantry walls. For a price.
"What do you think Jews would charge?" she smirked.
Yad Vashem insists that Jerusalem is the appropriate place to exhibit works of art left behind by the Nazis' Jewish victims, particularly given the anti-semitic history of places like Drogobych.
"Who cares about them in Drogobych?" the Jewish Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, said to the Warsaw newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Indeed, there is little in Drogobych to recall its Jewish past, or its most famous son, apart from the big pre-war synagogue, a powerfully eloquent monument to neglect, amnesia, and anti-semitism: the building is an abandoned, foul-smelling wreck of rubble, broken glass and rotting timber used by down-and-outs for shelter and others as a public toilet.
"It's right that the paintings have gone," said Lyubov Vasilkin, a researcher at the Drogobych history museum.
"Bruno Schulz suffered under the Germans and it's right that he should be immortalised in Israel."
But it is the manner of the paintings' leaving that distresses many people. And despite the Ukrainian government's protests, it is assumed here that government officials were complicit in their removal: an illegal act, since no pre-1945 work of art may be taken out of the country without a licence.
"The removal of the 'fragments' of sketches was conducted with the full cooperation of the Drogobych municipality, and it was and still is clear to Yad Vashem that the Drogobych municipality was aware of the laws in its own country," the Yad Vashem statement said.
The Israelis plan to restore the murals and exhibit them in a new Holocaust museum opening in 2004.
"I was actually in Israel when the paintings were taken," Geissler said.
"I was talking to people at Yad Vashem about establishing a Schulz museum in Drogobych. They said nothing."
Except for this statement: "Yad Vashem has the moral right to the remnants of those fragments sketched by Bruno Schulz ... The correct and most suitable place to house the drawings he sketched during the Holocaust is Yad Vashem."
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