Whose Art Is It Anyway?

The town of Drohobych is a short drive from the Polish border, in the pastoral landscape of western Ukraine. The place was once Austro-Hungarian, then Polish and is now fiercely nationalist and Catholic. Drohobych is at the center of a storm over the alleged theft of the last known works by Polish-Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz. In an ironic twist the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel, a guardian of the memory of the Holocaust, stands accused.

Schulz, creator of luminous drawings and lyrical prose, is Drohobych’s most famous son. He wrote and taught in a small secondary school here, and by 1937 his short stories had won him international renown. During the Nazi occupation Schulz was forced to work for the town’s Gestapo chief, Feliks Landau, until he was shot by Landau’s deputy in late 1942. In dispute are five fragments of murals — fairytale scenes thought to be from the Brothers Grimm — Schulz painted on the walls of Landau’s home for his two young children. For six decades the murals had been thought lost. But in February a 37-year-old German filmmaker, Benjamin Geissler, uncovered them hidden beneath coats of paint in the house still known in town as the Villa Landau. The cloak-and-dagger tale that ensued is worthy of Le Carré.

On Tarnovsky Street, the Villa’s steep gable roof looms above the balcony from which the Viennese Nazi used to shoot Jews for target practice. Inside are now five appartments. The one that housed the murals has for decades been home to Drohobych’s former Communist Party chief, Nikolai Kaluzhny, his wife Nadezhda and their family. Geissler found the drawings on the walls of a pantry where Nadezhda Kaluzhny had stored onions and potatoes. Though the filmmaker asked all the parties for secrecy, word of the discovery soon leaked.

In March a recent Ukrainian immigrant to Israel, Mark Shraberman, came to Drohobych on behalf of Yad Vashem. City officials insist he told them only that he was researching the town’s dark wartime years. Yet over a three-day period in late May, the fragments of the murals were carved out under Shraberman’s supervision and spirited out of Ukraine. Only on May 25 did Geissler learn that the works had been removed. Yad Vashem officials do not deny they took the murals, but they claim "a moral right" to them and say the works will be restored and displayed in a museum now under construction.

Nikolai Kaluzhny claims the murals are his since they were discovered on his property. Geissler says that before the Israelis took the fragments, Kaluzhny wrote him that he had refused a $3,000 offer for the works. Kaluzhny now claims that he gave the artworks to Yad Vashem for free. Two weeks ago Nadezhda Kaluzhny, armed with a rusty sickle, was not about to let a journalist into her apartment to see the remains of the murals. But the couple’s daughter, Larissa Yeryomchenkova, was eager to talk — and bargain. Asked how the Israelis could have taken the murals out of the city, let alone the country, without the knowledge, if not complicity, of Ukrainian officials, she replied: "When Jews want something, they know how to get it." She then offered a private view of the remaining fragments "for only $100."

Geissler, meanwhile, is "astonished" by what he calls "the robbery." "I’m not against Yad Vashem taking the art," he says, "but not in this underhand, illegal way. Schulz belonged to so many nations. He could play an important role in uniting these peoples." Geissler had sought the residents’ support in turning the Villa Landau into an international center for studying and reclaiming the past. But the threat of a museum in their home may well be what motivated the Kaluzhny family to make a deal with Yad Vashem. A criminal investigation is open in Drohobych.

The 250 Jews of Drohobych now must come to terms with their anger at Yad Vashem. Alfred Schreyer, who lost both his parents to the Nazis and was himself at Buchenwald, is the only Jewish survivor still in Drohobych who lived there during the occupation. Schulz taught Schreyer drawing and woodworking in school. Schreyer cannot believe "the tragedy and the damage Yad Vashem has done." Poles are outraged too. Schulz is "one of our classics," says Jerzy Jarzebski, a Schulz expert at Cracow University. "Not only did they destroy the mural," he says, "they didn’t ask the Jews of Drohobych for their opinion — and worst of all, they destroyed the idea of making this place a center for discovering the past, for Ukrainians, Jews, Poles and Germans."

The Schulz affair reveals how close to the surface the dark past remains in lands that fell to both the Nazis and the Soviets — and how that past can abruptly return to haunt those who had forgotten it. As Nadezhda Kaluzhny, the harried wife of the old Communist Party boss, said: "We knew about this house’s past, about that Gestapo monster shooting people from the balcony, but who could have imagined we’d never get any peace thanks to some old smearings on the wall?" It’s a rare and bitter irony — and one that Schulz would have enjoyed.