Morris Kestelman at the Imperial War Museum

At the Imperial War Museum currently is a very poignant exhibition called Unspeakable, The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust, which displays paintings and drawings by various artists, some of whom were prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The largest painting, entitled Lama Sabachhami (Why have you forsaken me - taken from the opening verse of Psalm 22) is by Morris Kestelman, who worked at the Central School of Art in London for 35 years. It was in his capacity as head of art, that he kept my father employed as a tutor long after the effects of Parkinson's Disease had taken hold. I dedicate this blog therefore both to the memory of a kind employer, and to the victims of the infamous death camp my father visited in June 1945, and which left such a profound and terrible visual and emotional legacy.