BANEINU (Our Sons) Acrylic and graphite on paper, 30×22″, 2025. -In the Holocaust Art Research Center permanent collection of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem.- Solo

 exhibition Gross-Rosen Muzeum, Rogoznica, Poland.- Winner of the 2025 Karen Walenka Memorial Exhibit of the American Guild of Judaic Art.

This is my painting of two young brothers formally posing for a family portrait, their last. The viewer is positioned as if a photographer.  A yellow star adorns each sweater as required by Nazi law. Four families sharing one apartment, one kitchen, one slop bucket. This is the new normal in the Kovno Ghetto in Slobodka, Lithuania. They are two of an estimated 9,200 Jews shot to death in “The Great Action” on October 28, 1941.

Share my multiple feelings: the irony of ‘normalcy’ in the pose contrasted with both the threat of death in the yellow stars and the boys’ facial expressions, their unprotected complete ‘aloneness’, my use of pearlescent glaze representing flesh transfiguring into spirit, their unhappiness and despair.

These boys represent all the Jews of this ghetto, and all the Jews of all the other ghettos, who died because they were Jews. This is antisemitism. Look at what antisemitism did and still does. Remember. Never forget.

Sidney H. Klein3950 North 45th AvenueHollywood, FL 33021954-245-9231
[email protected]

Holocaust Art https://sidneyhklein.artspan.com/home