Isaac Celniker (b. 1923), Ghetto with an Angel, 1967, Oil on canvas

Isaac Celniker was born in Warsaw and educated in Janusz Korczak's children's home. Between 1941 and 1943 he was interned in the Bialystok ghetto, where he became acquainted with several artists, and worked with them. In 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz. After his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, Celniker studied art in Prague and Warsaw. He has been living and working in Paris since 1957.

Celniker painted the picture "Ghetto With an Angel" over an extended period of time. In the picture, he brings together the victims and the perpetrators against the contextual background of events which occurred in the ghetto. The perpetrators are depicted as a platoon of marksmen, their shots being directed at several different groups of victims. The angel descending the ladder is reminiscent of the angels in Jacob's dream, and of the angel who wrestled with Jacob, who was renamed Israel after he proved victorious. The angel can thus be seen as a symbol of the Jewish nation. The lovers are Adam and Eve, mother and father of all mankind, emphasizing the fact that the crimes of the Holocaust were not only directed against the Jews, but against all humanity, and that the power of love failed to prevent destruction. In the foreground, the mother with her baby dead in her arms symbolizes the ultimate annihilation, which even a one-day-old baby did not escape. The candlesticks held by the second woman, Sabbath candlesticks with no candles, symbolize the Jewish woman, who preserved Jewish tradition in the shadow of terror. The Jewish boy wearing the yellow star represents the sole survivor. He holds a single candle, a memorial light to those who perished.