Voorhees artist and her work at hand, Germans mark Holocaust

For more than a year, Nelly Toll and her mother survived the Nazi occupation of Poland by hiding in a tiny room, sheltered by a Catholic family.

The young Jewish girl penned whimsical tales and painted watercolors to escape the horrors unfolding in the world outside. Her work depicted her fantasies of happier times.

Now some of it is part of a collection of Holocaust art that went on display last week at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

Toll, 80, of Voorhees, was on hand for the opening, which included two watercolors she painted as a child while in hiding until the Nazis were ousted by Soviet troops in 1944.

"It's hard for me to believe," she said last week after returning from a whirlwind trip to Germany with her husband, Ervin. "I was overwhelmed with everything."

The Holocaust art exhibit includes 100 works by 50 people who created their art in secret between 1939 and 1945 while in concentration camps, labor camps, or Nazi ghettos. About half of the 50 didn't live beyond World War II, but their work was preserved.

"I just was sad to see how many sad and depressing drawings there were," Toll said upon her return home. She said she was surprised to discover on arriving in Berlin that she was the sole surviving artist.

Items for the exhibition, "Art From the Holocaust," came from Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, and its collection of more than 6,000 pieces of Holocaust art.

The artwork was delivered to Germany in two shipments, so that in case of an accident, the entire collection would not be damaged or lost.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel used the exhibit opening to confront rising anti-Semitism in Germany. She said lessons from the Holocaust should encourage more tolerance for the millions who fled to Germany last year seeking asylum.

"We must focus our efforts particularly among young people from countries where hatred of Israel and Jews is widespread," Merkel said in Berlin.

For the exhibit, curators from Yad Vashem selected two of Toll's eight pencil and watercolor works from the permanent collection. She said the two are among her favorites. She donated the pieces to the museum years ago.

One depicts two girls walking in a field with flowers, and the other, inspired by the Cinderella fairy tale, shows a princess (not a prince) and Cinderella enjoying music.

Toll's pictures are considered priceless because they provide a rare viewpoint of the Holocaust from the perspective of a child, said Gail Rosenthal, a Holocaust educator and director of the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University.

"It was rare that a child survived a concentration camp," Rosenthal said. Like Nelly Toll, "the majority of the children who survived were in hiding."

Toll was 6 when German troops entered Lwow (now Lviv, Ukraine) in June 1941. Her father, a prosperous businessman, went into hiding and desperately tried to find a friendly Christian family willing to shelter a Jewish family.

Nelly spent several months by herself with a Christian couple across town, only to return to her family and learn that her brother and several other relatives had been seized by the Gestapo.

Eventually, her father found a Catholic couple, his former tenants, who agreed to take in Nelly and her mother, Rose.

The couple had a spare room with a bricked window. For over a year, Nelly stayed in that room with her mother. To keep her child occupied, her mother asked the couple to obtain art supplies.

In the room, Nelly began writing in a diary and painting - using her imagination and her memory of her previous life.

She depicted peaceful scenes of the fantasy world she believed was outside - children playing, a beautiful summer day, a girl and her dog, and a classroom of students.

In a diary, Toll recorded the harsh reality of what was unfolding: a close encounter with a police officer who came into the apartment.

"If I should be killed," Nelly wrote in her diary, "I hope that my art will reach the whole world so they can see what really took place and remember."

Her work is one of the largest collections of Holocaust art created by a child. Her watercolors have toured the United States. Her book, Behind the Secret Window: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood, published in 1993, is a widely used tool for teachers.

"Her works speak to the importance of remembering what happened during the Holocaust to so many people, both children and adults, whose lives were all changed because of the hatred, prejudice, and anti-Semitism that was allowed to grow," said Helen Kirschbaum, director of the Goodwin Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Cherry Hill

"It also reminds us that there were righteous gentiles who helped. There were so many people who stood by and did nothing," she said.

Hallmark incorporated Toll's artwork into a line of greeting cards, and her diary has been produced into a play.

"The way that she expressed her feelings through the art is very universal. There is nothing abstract about it," Rosenthal said.

In March, Rosenthal and a group of Stockton educators plan to escort a group of about 30 community leaders to Poland and Germany. They will stop in Berlin to visit the Holocaust exhibit.

When the war finally ended, Toll's father, brother, and cousins were dead, killed in camps. In 1951, she and her mother came to the U.S., settling in Vineland, N.J. Toll carried her paintings and diary everywhere she went.

She married Ervin Toll, an accountant, and had two children. Both became lawyers. She became an elementary schoolteacher and later a college professor.

Today, Toll teaches a graduate course in Holocaust literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She continues to paint, mostly large, colorful abstract pieces that she inscribes with one of her favorite quotes: "Believe in a better world."

The past, she says, "doesn't seem real."

"It seems too far away. It was a terrible tragedy," she said. "It's hard to believe that it did happen."

mburney@phillynews.com 856-779-3814 @mlburney