Son honors legacy of Twin Cities artist who survived the Holocaust in new exhibit
The Nazis and their collaborators did much more than just murder 6 million Jews; they killed their talents, their dreams and their futures, too.
The lives of the survivors, then, are an eternal victory — even if they couldn't defeat time.
"With my mom, there's a triumph," said Daniel Smith, whose mother, Lucy Kreisler Smith, died in 2022. "I'm still learning."
The triumph, as Smith puts it, is now on display at a special art gallery at 550 Vandalia Street in St. Paul, featuring hundreds of his mother's sketches, drawings, paintings and tapestries.
Most works are untitled and undated, but Smith said he drew on some common themes when setting up the exhibition.
"The effect of the Holocaust, the dreams, the nightmares, things in the back of her mind — I see those here," he said. "I'm not an art expert, but her use of color is really outstanding and interesting. Some of them you can see the thicker dollops of paint and she was going for texture."
The show is free and open daily, from 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., through April 26.
Kreisler Smith, whose given name was Lilka, was born in Poland in 1933, and was sent with her family to the Kraków Ghetto in 1939. While most of her relatives were sent to Nazi death camps like Treblinka, Kreisler Smith's father obtained counterfeit baptism papers for Smith and her mother, enabling them to escape and pose as a Catholic family.
According to Smith, Kreisler Smith and her mother remained in Poland until after the war and would need their survival instincts again living through Communism.
Kreisler Smith would move to Paris, meet and marry an American man and then follow him to the United States. The marriage didn't work out, but the Smiths would eventually settle in St. Paul in the 1970s.
Kreisler Smith's first person testimonies are recorded at the University of Minnesota and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The U's Center of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, moreover, has a collection of first-person accounts of survivors who lived in the Twin Cities, including Herbert Fantle, Victor Vital and Dora Zaidenweber, among others. They've all passed in recent years.
Rise in Antisemitism, Decline in Holocaust Literacy
Those lessons are perhaps needed now more than ever, too, as recent surveys show an increasing number of younger Americans who are either uninformed or indifferent to the facts of history.
A 2020 survey of 11,000 U.S. Millennials and Generation Z'ers found 63% of respondents were unaware that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis and collaborators. The survey also showed 48% of national respondents couldn't name a single ghetto or concentration camp, including Warsaw or Auschwitz.
The Pew Research Center also conducted a survey where 43 of respondents were unaware that Hitler was democratically elected.
Reported attacks against Jews in America were already rising in recent years, but they've since soared — especially on college campuses — after Hamas' brutal October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
