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?
The Copyists: Forgotten Artists of the Białystok Ghetto is a fascinating investigation based on the testimonies of Izaak Celnikier (1923 – 2011), the only artist from the Copyists’ studio who survived the Holocaust. 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.
Elena Makarova is an investigative historian. In her books University Over the Abyss (Verba Publishers, Ltd.), Путеводитель потерянных [Guide to
the Lost] (NLO), Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Vienna, 1898 – Auschwitz, 1944
(Tallfellow Press with Simon Wiesenthal Centre/Museum of Tolerance) and
others, she blows the memorial dust off the events and people who endured
the Holocaust and vividly brings them to life for us. The author of more
than 40 books translated into 12 languages, Makarova is renowned for her
research on the topics of terror and free will. She is a laureate of the Israel
Literary Prize (1996) and the Russian Prize for her book Eternal Shift (2016).