How can one speak of Isaac Celnikier's work when words already seem inadequate to convey, with the necessary dignity and without the counterfeit currency of metaphor, what is inscribed through drawing and color, what takes form within a medium and upon a canvas—especially when the scenes depicted by the painter transgress the unrepresentable nature of dehumanization and extermination?

To focus on the artist’s craft, would that not risk treating with a certain carelessness the harrowing reality that, though it failed to obliterate humanity, now inhabits it and claims it? Yet, to emphasize the historical truth evoked and transformed within his work would, conversely, set aside what constitutes the central event in his studio or exhibition: this singular body of work, destined for both permanence and universality. These are works that memory alone could not have produced without the hands and eyes that materialize the stubborn yet fragile presence of the past.

This is the contradiction faced by anyone attempting to write about Celnikier's art—this is the hesitation upon entering the space populated by the fertile insomnia of Isaac Celnikier. One feels observed while gazing at his monumental and intimate canvases, questioned while leafing through his meticulous and unrelenting engravings—questioned by the dead who are there, captured in the immediacy of their final days, and by their interpreter, who still believes in the possibility of expression and communication, not because he is Jewish, but because he is an artist.

No matter how informed one might be—whether by birth or by knowledge—about the realities of that time, there are always moments when something new is learned, and one realizes that without this understanding, it is as though one had known almost nothing. I once asked Celnikier about the figures in one of his paintings. He explained that when he depicted men and women, it was still the ghetto; when he depicted only men, it was already the camp. He pointed out what my untrained eyes had failed to perceive. Referring to the two successive stages of extermination, he had painted, then engraved, the ghetto—but the camp, at least until now, he had only been able to engrave.

In the ghetto, tenderness remains—the tenderness of couples destined for separation, the softness of bodies, even in terror, the fullness of life, even if it is dying, and often, color: dark, yes, but luminous. In contrast, the camp is defined by the abstraction of administered death, the enforced separation of sexes, and the black-on-gray of etching, with only occasional flashes of color to mark moments of revolt. When asked to explain the shift in his work from painting to engraving, Celnikier has said that this thematic and technical turning point coincided with the 1968 anti-Semitic persecutions in Poland.

It was only then that he dared to begin tracing the memory of Auschwitz. To avoid lapsing into platitudes about "the catastrophe" or seeking solace in meaning—even aesthetic meaning—I can only offer a few notes here and invite others to share in the striking, lasting impressions of his work:

Ashes.

At the center of the painting stands the painter himself, subjected to the common fate yet appearing transfigured: he emerges, astonishingly intact, crowned by a radiant yellow mane of hair. All those present seem to move toward him as though to a future survivor who will not abandon the community of those who were all destined to die. A woman, who appears to bear witness and calls for attention, holds a collapsed man against her. They are numerous, and it seems they are waiting not merely for their end, but for a word—a word they themselves do not yet know.

Kaddisch

Couples—old and young. Eyes wide open and eyes closed, gazing at each other and at infinity. Bodies, arms raised before the mortal command; bodies reassembled in the solemnity of the tallit. And a star, a secret treasure, a promise of nothingness.

Judith

She kills a German. She stands exposed in the center of what resembles a human knot. Close to her, beneath the shape she forms, a woman screams silently, and a man too, horribly. There is the green of the uniform and the red of the blood, yet they almost seem to blur together. As for the sky, it is yellow—because a Jew revolts. But there is no hatred, and Judith’s gesture, far from being dramatic, almost appears maternal. She annihilates evil for a moment, yet seems to bear no grudge against the German.

A face dominates—or rather embraces—the canvas, a face radiating kindness, intelligence, and European culture, like that of Janusz Korczak, whom the young Isaac Celnikier knew well in Warsaw.

Ghetto with the Angel

Ghetto with the Angel (variation, 1961, Yad Vashem collection).

The painting seems to have been created in a single stroke. And since it is a Jew painting Jews, even the German is swept into the innocent quest of the line, caught in the torrent of incomprehensible pain. A woman is shown from behind. A man holds her in his arms, his hand on her hair, the black blot of her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder. Above it all hovers an angel—Celnikier’s angel—bluish, sublime, an angel without the need for explanation.

Massada

Painted much later, during a period when the urgency of engraving the camps paralyzed the artist’s burin. Yellows and blues shine resplendently; the besieged are about to die but remain gloriously alive. In the Bialystok ghetto, too, there were suicides—entire families. The light of Massada subtly evokes them.

Day of Revolt

Depicts the loyalty of those who have nothing left to lose. Nothing at all? Perhaps not. For the Jew stabbing the German resembles Judith: the same people, the same tradition. He defends the honor of the human body only as a last resort. His strength feels sorrowful.

And then there is the engraved work of Isaac Celnikier. Color almost entirely disappears in these ultimate acts of remembrance, just as it had—despite the beautiful springs and autumns of the Polish countryside—abandoned the lives of those children of men condemned with manic precision to oblivion.

Isaac Celnikier engraved, as though "sketching," the days of death, the daily hours, minutes, and seconds, the meticulous precision of extermination rituals. And one is almost struck with fear upon recalling that this patient exactitude of line stems from the infinite effort of representation undertaken by a captive who returns time and again to the blinding light of the enclosure—to burn himself alongside his people, and to capture, without euphemistic blur yet without appropriation, the immobile intervals and incomprehensible postures of an eternal agony.

Not because he believed this would deliver them, nor because he sought liberation through repetition, but to keep vigil and pray, within the medium of matter and the starkness of the incommunicable.

Monotony of the engraving, monotony of the scenes with titles so absurdly picturesque: German Soup, Zum Bade, Arrival at Birkenau, Return of the Tortured, Removal of the Body, May Our Blood Fall Upon Them, Night of Departure, Korczak and the Others. And then Exodus from Auschwitz, a Jewish Pietà devoid of any promise of resurrection, whose construction, noble in its austerity, alludes through understatement to a despair no longer tied to a God-man but to an entire people.

Some engravings depict the ghetto, and the most difficult to endure visually is Absalom, Absalom, showing a naive scene from "better days": a horse tethered to a cart, children nearby. Yet the figures are so gaunt and sorrowful that it evokes Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil. When the drypoint shifts to depicting the camps, it becomes akin to Piranesi’s Prisons, yet stripped of architecture. From engraving to engraving, an endless wire emerges and unravels—a wire so unbreakable and spider-like that it continuously streaks the figures and backgrounds, penetrating the pitiful bodies, ensnaring them in the mortal threat of its electricity. Amid this systematic and frenzied interweaving of fencing, flat surfaces emerge, inviting an embrace. But these are not faces in the traditional sense; they are more like visages, stripped bare. Who else but the artist can grant the viewer the right to confront such humanity head-on, pleading with them to use this right?

Celnikier's dual vulnerability—as an artist and as a survivor—gave him the power to restore humanity and the world, either beyond their disfigurement or perhaps before it. His plastic force, infinitely benevolent and akin to a divine gift, soothes the chaos systematically orchestrated by the Nazis. Yet it does so without attempting to dissolve the unbearable correlation between suffering and cruelty through the aesthetic comfort of beautiful forms. Once again, one must settle for notes, if one hopes to approach the doubled enigma of Celnikier’s work: How could the extermination have occurred, and how could Celnikier—if not paint it—paint and engrave from the memory that besieges him?

First, the yellows. When they occasionally erupt, as in the engraving Struggle, they feel like a revolt. While one might usually associate the word struggle with reds and the sounds of a trumpet, here, in an unusual manner, the yellows burst forth, like the glow of a star or the sound of a shofar, amidst dark tones and heavy substance. Celnikier’s master is undoubtedly Rembrandt, as a skillful chiaroscuro scaffolds the planes and volumes, defying fatal dislocation.

Next, the representation of bodies. Emaciated, intertwined in powerful struggles or tender, rigorous embraces—as seen in the paintings—they bear witness to every torture yet never express degradation. Defenseless and innocent, like animals in Chagall’s work, they remain intact in the vivid eternity of their cry, preserved by the immemorial being-together that paradoxically condemns them to extermination.

Finally, the faces. When I spoke to Celnikier about them, he said: "The Germans recognized Jewish faces by a message we carry despite ourselves." I am not sure I fully understand the reality of such a message. Yet I know that the painter who restored the ghetto and evoked the camps has given us, in a single glance and with his entire soul, the marvelous diversity and mysterious resemblance of Jewish faces.

In a final act of defiance, memory etches itself against the premeditated crime, which concealed within itself the lie about the crime. In 1989, Isaac Celnikier painted Birkenau (Triptych). On the left: The Arrival of the Men. On the right: The Arrival of the Women. In the center: What Happens. The painter had to invent colors that are no longer colors to evoke the system that reduced men to something less than human. Yet, profoundly human, figures lean toward the collapsing bodies, heads tilted backward. On the left panel, faces begin to take on an animalistic quality, yet they are not deprived of the gaze that will question, until the end of time, what happened. On the right, among the women, is a group reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. But this is a Vinci of utter desolation: three women, three generations, collapsing in cascades—a grim reflection of the once-prolific Jewish genealogy. As for the central panel, all I can say is this: they long for an end, yet they do not submit. Here, painter Isaac Celnikier, like writer Primo Levi, reveals a truth inaccessible to historians—one that must be contemplated with humility.

Such a body of work cannot be reduced to mere testimony. One admires, with a painful gratitude, the endurance of art, which resists the mediocre transformation of mourning into reconciliation with reality. Celnikier’s paintings and engravings show, without any idealism, the unyielding humanity of beings who were stored, transported, and "processed" as biodegradable waste. For what Celnikier presents are not martyrs, nor even Jews, but simply beloved souls who were murdered. Yet visitors to Celnikier’s exhibitions understand that whoever said, “love is stronger than death,” neither lived during nor after that time.