Jewish girl’s paintings from WWII imagine happier times
When she was LANCASTER —
8 years old, Nelly Mieses went into hiding with her mother in Poland.
Members of her once-affluent Jewish family had moved from an apartment into the Jewish ghetto, then to a dairy barn near the Hungarian border, then to homes of nonJews willing to hide them — including one back in her hometown of Lwow, Poland. There, they concealed themselves in a small space in a cramped apartment across from Gestapo headquarters.
From a window in that last apartment, Nelly could watch children do something she couldn’t do: go to school. Another window was covered with bricks on the outside and veiled inside by a rug hung over it on the wall. When they needed to, Nelly and her mother would climb up on the windowsill to hide behind the rug.
From 1939 until 1944, during World War II, Poland was largely occupied by the Nazis, who ghettoized, evicted and murdered millions of Jews. Young Nelly, supplied with watercolors and brushes by a kind neighbor, turned the bleak years she was in hiding into colorful paintings and handwritten stories that dreamed of a better life.
More than 40 reproductions of those paintings are on view at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in the traveling exhibit “Imagining a Better World: The Artwork of Nelly Toll.” The exhibit, which runs through Dec. 30, was organized and first shown at the Massillon Museum after the museum’s executive director, Alexandra Nicholis Coon, discovered the paintings and worked with Toll, now 83, to amass and copy them.
The originals, in various locations throughout the world, are too fragile for a tour.
“I never thought of the paintings as being important,” Toll said recently by phone from her home in New Jersey. “I just knew that those drawings kept me occupied during those empty hours.”
The paintings represent one of the largest collections of surviving Holocaust works created by a child. At the Decorative Arts Center, they are hung alongside text panels recounting the story of Toll and her family as well as panels featuring examples of the stories Toll created.
She imagined family vacations, days spent with her beloved father (who disappeared during the war and was never heard from again), school days and even a luxurious bath in the painting “After a Full Day, A Bath Is Prepared by the Chambermaid.”
In reality, young Nelly and her mother crouched in a tub during a bombing of Lwow, unable to leave their hiding place for cellars, as others did.
The girl’s paintings are colorful and packed with detail. Paper was precious, so Nelly carefully planned her drawings and filled them with people, buildings, rooms and country scenes.
“My Birthday Card to My Mother” presents a pot of flowers with the words “Long Live Momma” above. Her mother, Rose, returned the sentiment on a card that shows Nelly surrounded by medals for her daughter’s obedience, loyalty and love.