23-04-2025
Son honors legacy of Twin Cities artist who survived the Holocaust in new exhibit
Holocaust Remembrance Day begins on Wednesday night in the Hebrew Calendar. It's being observed around the world, as well as in Minnesota.
In St. Paul, a special art gallery is open featuring hundreds of works by Holocaust survivor Lucy Kreisler Smith, who immigrated to the Twin Cities after the war.
Smith died three years ago but her son, Daniel Smith, hopes her art keeps her legacy alive forever.
"With my mom, there's a triumph," Daniel Smith said.
He admits he didn't have the greatest relationship with his mother, but his curating and opening the special gallery by himself is an act of love and gratitude.
"I mean, mostly I just see a person that really wanted to be heard," he said. "Her use of color, and I'm not an art expert, but her use of color is really outstanding and interesting. And some of them, you can see even thicker dollops of paint. You know, she was going for texture, too."
Lucy Kreisler Smith
Daniel Smith
Lucy Kreisler Smith was born Lilka Kreisler in Poland in 1933. The Nazis evicted her family to the Krakow ghetto when she was 6. Most of her relatives were murdered in death camps, but her father helped her and her mother survive by forging baptism records and posing as a runaway Catholic family.
She'd go from Poland to Paris and then the U.S., taking art classes along the way. She settled in St. Paul in the 1970s, and her drawing, painting and sewing never stopped until her death at age 89.
Her son says this gallery isn't exactly organized, with most of the art untitled and undated, but he did group some works together, which he calls "fantastical."
"This is just from her dreams," he said. "The effect of the Holocaust, the dreams, the nightmares, things in the back of her head, I see those here. I see those here. The monsters. You know, that's what I see in some of this work, and I say that's some of her Holocaust paintings, too."
But amid the darkness, there was always light.
"Yes there's hope. Look what happened. She went through a Holocaust and did all this," he said. "So yeah, there's hope."
Her first-person testimonies are recorded at the University of Minnesota and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The Gallery is in the Vandalia Tower in St. Paul is open daily through Saturday.
