Art: Berlin's Best

Berliners, like all Europeans, know the face of sorrow by heart, and it generally leaves them numb. But this picture was haunting, and the gallerygoers kept returning to it. It was an autumn landscape in which two old people, their backs turned, appeared to be thinking things over (see cut); a painting which spoke the timeless reproach of the dead, of those who would never again turn to face their persecutors.

The artist was Henry Koerner, a Vienna-born Jew. The painting, which was good enough to make Koerner's first one-man show an important event, represented his parents, liquidated by the Nazis.

Koerner himself...