Searching for her great-grandfather's lost pictures

“The city had a thriving Jewish community — they were intellectually and culturally and financially engaged in the health and wealth of Warsaw — and his paintings capture that moment. People didn’t know that the Holocaust was coming, so [his work is] a really special witnessing of a time-frame.”

For around two decades, she has been on a quest to honour Moshe’s memory by finding ways to bring his work to a wider audience: “I feel that art and culture belongs to all of us,” she opines, “and I feel like I have a sense of duty and obligation to share his art.”

To this end, she wrote a book, published in 2016, called Chasing Portraits, which delved into her family’s history as well as telling the story of the paintings, and created an online gallery to showcase the art. On Saturday, after ten years of work, she will add a documentary also entitled Chasing Portraits to the list, when it is unveiled at the 14th Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw.

Despite her passion and dedication, it’s clear she never expected to become the torchbearer for Moshe’s work. When Elizabeth was growing up, her father and his parents, who had miraculously survived World War Two living in Warsaw with fake papers that hid their Jewish identity, “didn’t really talk much about the war at all”. That she would one day find herself the custodian of Moshe’s legacy was almost unthinkable, until his son, George, Elizabeth’s grandfather, died leaving behind an unfinished memoir, in which he said: “I write this for no other reason than for my granddaughter, Elizabeth, to know the truth.”

She was “finally at a point in life where I was interested in the past and the history”, she says, but still wasn’t ready. “I was 21 or 22, and I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do with this? I’m not a Holocaust survivor. I don’t know how to bear witness to this history.’”

Part of her journey has been to understand and embrace her identity as a second generation Holocaust survivor, which happened relatively late, due in part to not having been raised around other children of survivors. When “Grandpa George” died, “I started searching for answers in different ways,” says Elizabeth. Discovering Art Spiegelman’s Pultizer-winning graphic novel Maus, about coming to terms with his own family’s history, was a big moment for her, she recalls: “It opened up this whole idea to me that there were others struggling to understand how a history not exactly their own had impacted and shaped their lives.”

One reason for the silence when she was a child might have been the way Moshe had become separated from his son, daughter-in-law and grandson by electing to enter the Warsaw ghetto. George tried to persuade him to escape, but to no avail. (“My guess is George had a lot of guilt that he didn’t save his father, but what could you do?” says Elizabeth.) Although Moshe had longed to be seen as a painter first and Orthodox Jew second when he was younger, and was assimilated and secular when the Nazis arrived, he told his son he wanted to be with his people, even if it meant death.

In a sense Moshe had a foot in the new and the old world. “From what I understand, he struggled with his own identity,” says Elizabeth. “He wanted to live a modern contemporary life, but he also felt the tug of his family’s past and feeling of obligation to a religious community that was important to him.

“It’s so hard for me to understand. Because when I look at photographs from the early 20s or early 30s of relatives from my family that perished in the war, there is a desire to yell, like, ‘Leave! Run while you can!’ Because you know what’s coming, right?

“But I think he never felt that he would be murdered. I think he felt that the German people were a very cultured, intellectual people, and the idea that there would be mass murder and genocide . . . ” She trails off into silence.

With the German occupation of Warsaw imminent, Moshe had divided up around 800 paintings into bundles, and distributed them to people he trusted for safekeeping. After the war, his widow, Perla, was only able to recover 120 of them, in Warsaw’s virtually unscathed Praga district. His son George died thinking the rest had probably been destroyed. So when Elizabeth found out that the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw had 52, she was “shocked”. Some she was able to see in photographs. Others she saw for the first time when she visited Warsaw in 2014 – one of a number of moving encounters captured on film for the documentary.

“Each and every time I discover a new painting, it’s really a personally profound moment,” she says.

Early on, she entertained the idea of trying to reclaim paintings. However, she quickly realised that she needed proof of ownership for each work — a receipt, or a photograph of the family standing with it, for example — and Moshe didn’t have any to leave behind. It was his art, after all. This made the situation more complicated, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York told her, because artists “sell their work, they give it away, they barter it, they exchange it, so if somebody else had a painting, I don’t know how they got it, and I had no way to prove it.”

Art reclamation requires lawyers who often take their fee from the sale of recovered pieces. When Randol Schoenberg successfully reclaimed Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, it eventually sold for a reported $135 million. “The Rynecki paintings are never — all of them together — going to sell for that much money. So we’d be out of pocket. It’s really, really expensive, and seems kind of impossible.”

There are different paths to achieving restorative justice, though, and Elizabeth has found hers by adopting the role of historian rather than claimant. She still has “mixed emotions” about paintings being out of the family’s hands, and is “ready with open arms” if people fall out of love with them.

“But if they hold on to them, I feel like they have a responsibility to understand the larger history. What they have on their walls are not just pretty pictures,” she says. “They are paintings with a history and a complicated past, and they are part of a larger collection. And they, like the Jewish people, are scattered around the world. And that’s okay. But people need to know that they are linked. And that’s what the book and the documentary try to do: tell that larger story.