These artworks were discovered by chance in summer 2018 during renovations on a crumbling house on the outskirts of Prague. The paintings and drawings tumbled out of walls and ceilings, part of a cache of over seven hundred works by the Czech Jewish artist Gertrud Kauders. Kauders had concealed her life’s work within the building before she was deported in 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp. Soon after, she was murdered at the Majdanek death camp in Lublin, occupied Poland. Her hidden body of work remained untouched and undiscovered for more than seventy-five years.
Kauders came of age in cosmopolitan Prague. With the support of her family—affluent, assimilated (integrated into non-Jewish cultures), German-speaking Jews—she studied art in Munich and Paris and was an active, prolific, and well-regarded member of the Czech art world. Scholars of this period knew of the artist but believed that her work was lost or had been destroyed during World War II. Vibrant and intimate, her compositions memorialize a life cut short and offer a glimpse into a vanished world through her humane and perceptive eyes.