Leskly, Eli (1911-2004) | Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Erich Lichtblau, later known as Eli Leskly, was born in 1911 in Hrusov (Hruschau), Czechoslovakia (then Austria-Hungary). Little is known about his life in interwar Czechoslovakia (1919-1939). There are only two scarce biographical notes, which relate that he was trained as a commercial designer and that, in 1940, he and his wife, Else, lived in the town of Pisek.

In November 1942, Erich and Else Lichtblau were deported to Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto, which, besides being a main incarceration center for Central European Jews, also served as a place used to deceive the world that the Jews of Europe were alive and being treated well. (The Nazi regime used it as a stage for filming propaganda and a tourist stop for international commissions.) Being an inmate and an employee of the Technical Department, Erich Lichtblau exercised a relative freedom of mobility within the ghetto. He thus had a unique opportunity to observe day-to-day scenes of ghetto life. Having pictured these mini-stories in his mind, he began to transfer them on to paper. Between 1942 and 1945, he created a pictorial ghetto-diary. Not long before liberation, Lichtblau, fearful of SS searches for evidence incriminating the Germans, destroyed many of his paintings, especially the captions to the watercolors. His wife Else managed to salvage many fragments, by clandestinely hiding them. After the liberation they recovered the hidden artworks.

Erich Lichtblau's artworks significantly differ from a ‘typical’ Holocaust graphic. The works capture the complications and ironies of Theresienstadt. They universally depict the fundamental desperation lurking in every moment of life in the show ghetto. Instead of a barbed wire, striped uniform, and death scenes, ghetto life is seen through the prism of everyday errands and chores, depicted in grotesques and caricatures. Erich Lichtblau convincingly challenges the Nazi anti-Jewish concepts by depicting and interpreting the ghetto life in a style he would use for a ‘normal’ commercial advertisement in his prewar practice.

While in Israel, circa the 1960s, Lichtblau changed his name to Eli Leskly.