Holocaust Survivor’s Artistic Expressions Created Fantasy World in Wartime Hiding

SEA ISLE CITY – This resort’s public library organized a lecture and poetry reading Sept. 19 by Dr. Nelly Toll, Holocaust survivor and Voorhees resident. Toll’s program, the “Grand Finale” of the series organized by the library in its “Beach Bards Poetry & Prose” program, was entitled “Believing in a Better World.” 
Toll was born in Lwow, Poland. She was six years old when she and her family went into hiding for two years during the Holocaust because they were Polish Jews.
During that time, she created a series of watercolors and a diary that became the source of her critically acclaimed and award-winning memoir, “Behind the Secret Window.”
She and her watercolors were recently received and viewed in Berlin, Germany by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Toll earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and continues to teach, write, and paint. She is also a well-regarded speaker in locations around the world.
Toll spent much of her lecture time narrating some of the hundreds of drawings she created when she was that small child in hiding from the Gestapo. “I was bored, of course, alone with my mother in a very small apartment in a building that my parents owned. Mr. and Mrs. W. had been allowed by my father to live there for free in a small three-room ground-level apartment since they could not pay and they returned the favor by hiding us from the Nazis. We always lived in fear of retribution by neighbors who might discover us since they would be handsomely rewarded financially if they turned us in.”
Many of Toll’s watercolors portray happy family scenes and images of friends together doing normal things that any child would want to do. “In this one where I am bathing a dog, I never had a dog but always thought it would be nice to have one. In fact, I was terrified of dogs since they could always sniff out a hiding place which made me so fearful that my mother and I would be discovered. And these watercolors show me wearing a bow in my hair with imaginary friends at school and playing. My mother always put a bow in my hair even though I was never going anywhere,” explained Toll.
Other watercolors done by Toll as she lived out her life “behind the secret window” show her playing dominoes with her mother and even imagined scenes from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as characters cross a wide river to freedom or peasant huts from novels by Tolstoy.
“We asked trusted people to get us books from the library, but since they didn’t have any children the only books they could bring back without arousing suspicion were books for adults. So these novels also became part of my fantasy world,” said Toll.
Toll said she was able to save all her 60 notebooks containing hundreds of watercolors and her diary since they were more important to her than the jewelry for example that others took with them as they fled the Germans.
“Behind the Secret Window” has been performed at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton and in the Netherlands.
Her drawings were included in an exhibit “100 Days of the Holocaust” where she was the only Holocaust survivor as artist to be present.
Eight of her watercolors are on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and another eight at the Children’s Museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem.
Some of the watercolors have been made into postcards and others by Hallmark into cards. 
After the war, which claimed the lives of her father and other members of her family, Toll and her mother traveled first to Paris and then on to the United States.
“My mother died in Cherry Hill at the age of 82. She was a very special lady and was always able to convince me that everything would be fine. She also protected me from Mr. W. who was not ‘all there’ and would threaten me by saying he was going to turn me in to the Gestapo if I did not behave. On top of all this, he was very abusive to his wife although he really loved my mother. So we had a lot to deal with both inside and outside of that apartment,” recounted Toll.
Toll’s story is one to remember for both past atrocities against the Jewish population and also to keep in mind as the nation experiences acts of senseless racial and religious animosity.
To contact Camille Sailer, email csailer@cmcherald.com.