Pope to Get Copies of Nazi Victim’s Art

Before he was arrested and carted off to his death at the Auschwitz concentration camp, Belgian artist Carol Deutsch painted 99 scenes from the Bible, a birthday gift for his 2-year-old daughter.

On Thursday, copies of 10 of those paintings will be presented to Pope John Paul II when he makes a much-anticipated visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, a hillside memorial that is both chilling and poignant in its homage to the 6 million Jews killed in World War II.

The people who run Yad Vashem thought long and hard about an appropriate gift for the pope, something that would capture the horror of the Holocaust while saluting the basic values and roots shared by Christianity and Judaism. John Paul’s goal in his pilgrimage to Israel is to try to heal the wounded relations between the two faiths, and many here expect him to address Christian complicity in the Holocaust.

When Deutsch and his wife were arrested in 1943 by Nazis who occupied Belgium and were shipped quickly to their deaths, their daughter, Ingrid, remained behind, lost in the world until neighbors rescued her and her most precious belongings, the paintings.

Ingrid survived and eventually moved to Chicago, where she married and had a daughter, Karem Abrams. Still, the Holocaust left permanent traumatic scars on Ingrid, who died in 1983. She bequeathed the paintings to Yad Vashem.

The paintings tell of God’s covenant with man and of man’s evil. One painting shows Moses receiving the Ten Commandments; in another he is speaking to God through the burning bush. Others depict the great deluge and the escape of the biblical character Lot from Sodom and Gomorrah.

“The whole story is there,” said Avner Shalev, the museum’s chairman. “The roots and the beginning and the basic, basic values--and the violation of the values, with everything destroyed and abandoned. The whole thing is capsulized.”

The paintings, which are surprising in their bright colors and have an almost Art Deco look, weren’t displayed at Yad Vashem until recently.

“We wanted to give the pope something very significant,” Shalev said.