When Wolfenstein passed away in 2003, she took up the mantle as her own.
“I have finally fulfilled the deathbed promise I made to my mother to recover her cherished property,” said King. “As a naturalised British citizen and proud Anglophile, she would have been thrilled that I donated her suitcase and its nearly 700 drawings to the Wiener Library.”
Kien, whom King referred to as her mother’s “soulmate”, entrusted his suitcase to Wolfenstein on the eve of his deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944. He instructed her to hide the suitcase under a bed in the ghetto’s infectious diseases ward, where her mother worked, on the correct assumption that the Nazis would not enter the place for fear of infection. It remained there until Theresienstadt was liberated in 1945.
Wolfenstein emerged from the ghetto with both the suitcase and her life. But Kien himself, a gifted artist and polymath with a promising future ahead of him, was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of 25, along with his parents and his estranged wife.
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Peter Kien (centre) (Photo: Wiener Library)[Missing Credit]
His drawings, poems and letters from 1941-1944 immortalise not only Kien’s artistic sensibility but his vision of Theresienstadt. Using materials from the ghetto’s technical drafting department where he worked, Kien sketched the hauntingly mundane world around him: a crowd of people boarding a train, men shovelling beside a cart, a woman playing piano. His portraits of fellow residents, the most detailed and expressive of his collection, reveal the unyielding humanity he saw in those around him. Many of the portraits, drawn on stolen paper in graphite or pen, are likely the last records of people who later perished in extermination camps.
“Kien’s drawings serve the dual purpose of depicting the strong cultural life of the ghetto in the face of Nazi oppression, and themselves representing the cultural output of a Jewish artist during his persecution, whose life was then cut tragically short by the Nazi regime,” said Dr Barbara Warnock, interim co-director of the Wiener Holocaust Library.
“Our efforts to now conserve and digitise the drawings will ensure these fragile works can be interpreted as crucial historical evidence and inform our future public outreach, education and exhibition programmes.”
Wolfenstein, who went on to live in Libya and the UK before settling in the US, first stored Kien’s suitcase at her aunt’s flat in Prague, fearful that the post-war communist authorities would confiscate it if she tried to take it over the border. The suitcase remained there until 1971, when a handyman discovered its contents and informed the communist authorities. Wolfenstein’s subsequent 33-year campaign for its return to her family’s custody lasted until her death, and after another 22 years, her daughter managed to finish the mission.
Dr Stefanie Rauch, head of collections at the Wiener Library, called the artwork a “once in a decade” acquisition, especially because it added to the archive’s several other surviving works by Kien, including a libretto and some poetry, which were acquired 20 years previously.
“We actually only just learnt that these items originally were kept in the same suitcase in which all the drawings were kept,” Rauch said. “So we’re finally now being able to reunite these different elements of his work.”
But some pieces of Kien’s Theresienstadt oeuvre remain in private hands. Unbeknown to the Wiener Library, 14 sketches by the late artist have been hanging on JC writer Gloria Tessler’s walls since the early 1990s, when she flew to Prague on a mission to rescue her relative’s long-lost creations.
“Peter was my mother’s first cousin, and they grew up like brother and sister because their families lived in adjoining flats in Varnsdorf,” Tessler said.
Both born in the northern Czech town in 1919, the cousins played together as children, and Tessler grew up hearing stories about the “gifted” relative who attended the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Prague but was murdered at Auschwitz before his life had really begun. When they were 19, Tessler’s mother managed to get a visa to emigrate to England.
“Peter had told her: ‘I’m not Jewish enough to join one of the Jewish organisations that could help me get away, and I’m too old for Kindertransport’ – and that was the last she ever saw of him,” Tessler said.
“And my mother always regretted that she didn’t have even a single drawing by Peter.”
In the 1990s, Tessler decided to see if she could change that. She tracked Kien’s drawings to the Prague Jewish Museum, where she understood that his work had ended up after “being handed from one survivor to another for 30 years”.
“The curator said I could have them if I was willing to pay for them, so I paid £200 for 14 of them,” said Tessler, who later wrote the 2004 play Windmill based on Kien’s imprisonment at Theresienstadt.
“I had them framed on acid-backed paper, because of their age, and now they happily adorn my house.”
Tessler said she’s eager to see Kien’s collection on display at the Wiener Library when it’s made available to the public, especially after having corresponded with Wolfenstein – whom she said was “clearly the love of Peter’s life” – while writing Windmill.
Her mission to claim pieces of Kien’s artwork shares more in common with King’s multi-decade restitution effort than the man whose work they pursued; both women are the daughter of survivors who loved him, and both wanted to ensure that his drawings fell into hands that would preserve them with care.
“One could say that Kien’s longevity, transmuted through his artwork, owes everything to the devotion between mothers and daughters.
“I am filled with enormous gratitude and feel lighter without this challenging labour of love,” said King. “Once the artworks are catalogued and conserved, the world will get to appreciate a treasure trove of newly donated Holocaust art.”
