The Copyists: Forgotten Artists of the Białystok Ghetto

Foreword
The scene is Białystok. Poland. Next to the gates of the ghetto, in a factory
building owned by the German entrepreneur Oskar Steffen, Jewish artists
are hard at work. In the past, they had been graduates of art academies in
Warsaw, Paris, Krakow, and Munich. Now they are hand-drawing hundreds
of copies of the Old Masters’ paintings which are sent from their studio to
the far reaches of the Reich. For whom are they intended? Should we bother
to search for them?
Together with
the author Elena Makarova, readers will immerse themselves in the lives of Jewish shtetl dwellers and urban Jewish bohemians; they will read the reviews and notices of exhibitions; and they will view the illustrations published in
the Yiddish, Polish, and French press. Originals of the Copyists’ works have been discovered in the warehouses of museums in Poland, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Israel as well as in attics in private collections. Now the artists annihilated in the Holocaust can acquire faces and voices; the author enables them to breathe, and we become participants in their meetings, their discussions, and their suffering.