Untitled, Execution: Babi Yar series. Nizhny Tagil or Leningrad

Felix Lembersky’s three Babi Yar paintings were among the first artistic representations of the Nazi massacre in Kyiv, when, over the course of two days in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were murdered in Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city. After the war, when Soviet policy called for downplaying the fact that Jews were specifically targeted for genocide by depicting all victims of the Nazis only as “Soviet citizens,” Lembersky was not allowed to exhibit these paintings. His daughter remembers that visitors would come to their home in Leningrad for clandestine viewings and stand before them with heads bowed, perhaps reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning.