Chasing Portraits

In this 2019 documentary, filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki set out on a journey to Poland in pursuit of the lost artwork of her great-grandfather, Moshe Rynecki, a prolific painter of pre-WWII Jewish life in Warsaw and the surrounding countryside. Though the filmmaker’s grandfather, George, and his family survived the Holocaust, Moshe did not. He made the decision to stay with his people in the Warsaw ghetto. From there, the Nazis shipped him to the Majdanek concentration camp and killed him. His artwork was hidden throughout the city, which, by the end of the war, lay completely decimated, no more than mountains of rubble for as far as the eye could see.

After the war, the artist’s wife recovered some 120 of the 800 pieces that made up his life’s work, but more were scattered by the chaos of the postwar years, some sold, some plundered, some destroyed. In making the 2019 film, Elizabeth Rynecki continued the search for her great-grandfather’s legacy, taking a historian’s role, seeking to document the fate of the paintings rather than to reclaim them, in all but one case. That mysterious case, which weighed on her with exhaustion as visible as the fabric of her clothes, is one that human intransigence forced her to abandon. Yet, with all the gravity of the subject, there was also humor and good will. One collector even went as far as making a gift to Elizabeth of one of Moshe’s works. She returned to the United States, having furthered the moral imperative she felt to preserve her family’s history.

When I saw the film, I was moved by the creator’s struggle, and I also felt a nostalgic connection. My late stepmother, the beloved, warm, funny, and sophisticated mentor of my youth, was from a family that fled Poland to escape the looming threat of extermination. She seldom spoke to me about her family’s escape. I know that they traveled from “a small shtetl” and entered the United States at Ellis Island where my stepmother eventually paid to have their names inscribed on the Wall of Honor. Their previous life in that small Polish town might have been something like the world depicted by Moshe Rynecki is his vibrant, emotional, Impressionistic style. They might have attended a joyous carnival with rides that whirled above the crowd. They would have attended synagogue. They would have shopped in the open-air market. They would have seen the beauty of a traditional wedding like the one Moshe Rynecki portrayed. It means a great deal to me to feel I have seen something of the past of my stepmother’s family.

Through her work, Elizabeth Rynecki has preserved a record of a spirited life and a dynamic culture now lost to atrocity. Fewer than a tenth of Poland’s Jewish community survived the Holocaust. So now it is up to the art to show the world an impression of what once was. You can see an online collection of Moshe Rynecki’s work at Rynecki.org, and you can stream the film Chasing Portraits online.