Halina Nelken's home

In her memoirs, Nelken describes their apartment: a parent's cozy bedroom that was "filled with Viennese furniture decorated with inlays of light blond wood". A door from the bedroom led to a dining - living room. Half of the opposite to the door space was taken by a "credenza which looked like a mighty castle flanked by two turrets and decorated with carvings and little galleries". In the middle in the niche of the credenza was a statue of Moses with ten commandments. Halina recalls that she was afraid of it. Tiny animals carved on coral, ivory, agate, amber stood at the back of the cabinet. The middle shelf had wine glasses, heavy mugs and a tall pitcher made of dark green glass with a crimson coat of arms Poland and Lithuania. Sometimes those items were arranged into a fairy tale palace on the carpets brought by Halina's grandfather from Turkey.

Halina Nelken was born in 1927 into an assimilated Jewish family of Polish patriots that lived on Dlugosza street 7 in Cracow. On the 20th of March 1941, at the age of seventeen, like many together with her family, Halina Nelken was locked in a ghetto. After the liquidation of ghetto Halina with her mother and brother were sent to the KL Plaszow, later to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, Malechow and Lipsk. After the war she studied art history at the Jagiellonian University and later perceived a career in that field. At the end of the 1950s she left Poland and moved to Vienna and further to the USA. She devoted her career to research on Jewish motifs in Polish art. The result of her work and several exhibitions was gathered in a publication Images of a lost world: Jewish motifs in Polish painting, 1770-1945, published in 1991 in Oxford and London. As a volunteer of the International Executive Service Corps, she went to Malawi and Zimbabwe twice to protect and archive the local folk art. She also conducted educational activities aimed at local artists. Halina Nelken died on 15 March 2009.