How the work of a celebrated artist killed by a Nazi mysteriously ended up in Israel
In ‘Bruno Schulz,’ author Benjamin Balint follows the dark story of a renowned Polish-Jewish creative turned SS officer’s artist-slave, and the battles over his surviving legacy
- Bruno Schulz, 'Dedication,' 'The Book of Idolatry,' 1920s. (courtesy)
- Bruno Schulz, 'Encounter: A Young Jewish Man and Two Women in an Urban Alley,' 1920, oil on cardboard. (Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, Warsaw)
- Bruno Schulz, 'The Enchanted Town II, Drohobycz,' 1920-1922. (Courtesy)
- Detail of a mural by Bruno Schulz. (Courtesy)
On May 19, 2001, three Israeli agents entered an apartment on the second floor of Villa Landau in Drohobych, a regional city in western Ukraine’s Lviv Oblast. With rubber mallets and chisels, using what art conservators call the stacco method, they carefully removed from the walls of the property five fragments of murals which were then quickly moved across the border into Poland and loaded onto a jet bound for Israel.
The murals were painted during the Holocaust by Polish Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by a Nazi in 1942 at the age of 50. At the time, Schulz was walking home toward the Drohobych Jewish Ghetto with a loaf of bread under his arm.
On the eve of World War II, Drohobych contained approximately 17,000 Jewish residents. There were only about 400 known Jewish survivors after the war. Today, there is no grave containing Schulz’s remains, as their location is unknown. Schulz’s fresco paintings are, however, on public display in Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Literary biographer Benjamin Balint refers to the clandestine cultural repatriation project it took to get the frescoes to Israel as “Operation Schulz.” Balint claims the operation was carried out at the direct order of Avner Shalev, who served as chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate from 1993 until 2021.
“I got two off-the-record sources, from senior figures within Yad Vashem, who confirmed to me that Avner Shalev got the green light for Operation Schulz directly from then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon,” Balint tells The Times of Israel from his home in Jerusalem.
“My sources also said that the Mossad used bribes in this smuggling operation and that one of the three Israeli agents who went to Drohobych to carry out the mission was [allegedly] a former KGB [employee], Mark Shraberman — he made aliyah in the 1990s, emigrating from Ukraine to Israel, and became one of the chief archivists at Yad Vashem,” Balint says, using the Hebrew term for immigration to Israel.
Balint says he contacted both Shalev and Shraberman for interviews several times, but both declined to comment. The Israeli author elaborates on the complexities of this story in his new book “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History,” which was released in mid-April. The narrative draws on extensive new reporting, archival research, interviews conducted in Poland, Ukraine, and Israel, as well as scattered letters and memoirs.
The award-winning Jerusalem author, whose previous books include “Kafka’s Last Trial” and “Running Commentary,” says he was partially inspired to pen his latest work because of his own family history.
“My grandparents were from what was then Polish Galicia,” he says. “So I have always been interested in trying to understand more about that part of [Europe]. My grandfather survived Buchenwald and, with my grandmother, was able to make it to London, where my mother was born.”
Paintings for an SS ‘guardian devil’
Balint begins “Bruno Schulz” on February 9, 2001, when a pair of documentary filmmakers from Hamburg — Benjamin Geissler and his stepfather, Christian Geissler — rediscovered Bruno Schulz’s last known artworks, which were hidden for several decades behind a wall in Villa Landau, in Drohobych. During the Holocaust, the property, which had previously served as a police headquarters, became the home of sadistic high-ranking Viennese SS Nazi Felix Landau. He took part in Einsatzgruppen murders throughout Eastern Galicia, a region of Eastern Europe that played a crucial role in the genocide of the Jews.
In July 1941, Landau arrived in Drohobych, then part of Nazi-occupied Poland, and gave himself the nickname “General of the Jews.” Landau eventually established a social connection with Schulz, who had by then already made a name for himself in the Polish literati, publishing two collections of short stories: “Cinnamon Shops” and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” Schulz’s fiction has since been translated into 45 languages.
Schulz was a talented illustrative artist, too, and displayed his art in galleries in Warsaw, Lwów, Vilna, and Kraków, often in group shows alongside other Jewish artists. Balint describes Schulz’s art as unmistakably “pulling toward the masochistic and reflecting an obsession with a world of sewers and gutters.” The masochistic, female-worshiping aesthetics of Schulz’s artworks caught the eye of Landau, who “perhaps sensed in Schulz that which he wished to overcome in himself,” says Balint. “The sadist [Landau] transformed Schulz into a passive artist-slave.”
They were not friends, though. In return for Schulz’s services as an artist, Landau kept Schulz as “his lackey and personal Jew.” Schulz got access to extra food rations — soup and bread — during a time when 30 Jews were starving to death a day in Drohobych.
“Landau was Bruno Schulz’s guardian devil,” says Balint. The author notes how in June 1942 (six months before he was murdered), Schulz was ordered by Landau to paint murals for the children’s room in Villa Landau, Drohobych. “These were painted under duress, which makes it an interesting example of art under coercion,” says Balint.
The artist used a “dry fresco” technique, which involves applying paint directly to dry plaster, to create colorful, fanciful figures depicting fairytale scenes, Balint explains. In the book’s prologue, the author describes a visit to Yad Vashem where he took in Schulz’s paintings: “One rough-hewn fragment depicts a seductively dressed, resplendent Snow White surrounded by red-hatted gnomes… Another tableau features a colorful carriage drawn forward on clattering wheels into an uncertain distance by two splendid horses ready to canter away,” Balint writes.

Shortly after discovering these murals in Villa Landau in February 2001, Benjamin Geissler alerted numerous cultural officials from Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Israel respectively — including representatives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Most of the informal conversations and meetings that followed between the various representatives from different cultural affiliations and countries primarily focused on two main issues: how to restore the murals and how to secure them against theft. Less than four months later, however, the agenda had changed considerably, since the paintings were already in Israel.
Bribes, legal battles, and a ‘moral right’
According to Yad Vashem, Nikolai Kaluzhni, who was then residing in the property where the murals were discovered, “consented to give Yad Vashem all but one of the Schulz sketches, pending his written confirmation and signature.” Borys Voznytsky, a former director of the state-funded Lviv Art Gallery, however, previously called the signed document “a dubious and un-notarized gift deed… written by a sick person after a stroke.”
Balint cites both of these quotes in his book. Elsewhere, he quotes several other scholars and intellectuals who claim Israel obtained Schulz’s artwork via bribery and corruption. Joel Rappel, a historian at Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Holocaust Research who knew the background to the 2001 operation extremely well, told Balint that the removal of the murals “was followed by a cover-up operation.” Andriy Pavlyshyn, a Ukrainian scholar and translator of Schulz, claimed local Ukrainian police officers took bribes to escort the truck to the Polish border.
“Two sources told me that the alleged bribes [in Operation Schulz] amounted to $900,000 and one of those sources, Drohobych Jewish communal leader Leonid Golberg, added that he was beaten up by bruisers after publishing a newspaper article that referred to the bribes,” says Balint.
The author also notes that Israel’s [then-]ambassador to Poland, the late Shevah Weiss — who served as speaker of the Knesset from 1992 to 1996 and as chairman of the Yad Vashem Council beginning in 2000 — used his diplomatic immunity to help bring the Schulz murals across the border from Ukraine into Poland back in May 2001.
Operation Schulz also defied numerous Ukrainian and Polish laws, as well as international ones. Balint stresses that Polish law forbids the export of artworks created before 1945. Ukraine, too, requires prior approval from the Ministry of Culture for the export of cultural property created before or during World War II. The removal of the paintings also violated both the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, ratified by 140 countries, including Poland and Ukraine, as well as accepted standards for the treatment of artistic heritage set forth by ICOM (the International Council of Museums, a UNESCO organization founded after World War II).
Balint claims that, in June 2001, two Drohobych officials — deputy mayor Taras Metyk and Mikhail Michatz, head of the culture and arts department — acknowledged an “illegal conspiracy” between city officials and Yad Vashem to remove Schulz’s murals. That summer, Ukraine lodged official complaints both with the Israeli government and with ICOM. On September 11, 2001, Yad Vashem chair Shalev replied in a letter to ICOM secretary-general Manus Brinkman, stating that “Yad Vashem has the moral right to the remnants of those fragments sketched by Bruno Schulz.”

“It’s interesting that Yad Vashem never gave a legal defense,” says Balint. “From the very beginning, they spoke in terms of asserting a moral right. To me, this is an open question.”
Balint believes there are parallels between Operation Schulz and the 1960 case of Israel’s Mossad spy agency abducting Adolf Eichmann in Argentina to bring him back to Israel for trial.
“This book [attempts to return] to a very important question: how legitimate is it, and under what circumstances, can a moral right — especially a moral right asserted by a nation — supersede international laws?” Balint says.
He notes that it took nearly seven years after the Israeli operation to spirit Schulz’s murals to Jerusalem for Israel and Ukraine to reach a legal agreement on this matter: the disputed artworks would remain in Yad Vashem “on loan” from Ukraine for 20 years, after which the loan could be renewed every five years. The Israelis also pledged to provide Drohobych with facsimile copies of the murals.
On February 28, 2008, Pinchas Avivi, deputy director general and head of the Central Europe desk in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, Ihor Tymofieiev, signed an agreement outlining these details in the presence of Shalev and Ukraine’s vice-prime minister, Ivan Vasyunik. A year after the signing, in February 2009, Yad Vashem put Bruno Schulz’s murals on public display for the first time.
The overlooked
But the story contains two other disgruntled parties. Poland believes an invaluable cultural artifact from one of its most beloved writers has been stolen. In 1892, the year of Schulz’s birth, Drohobych belonged to Galicia — originally a Polish territory annexed by Austria in 1772. Drohobych then became part of the Second Polish Republic between 1919 and 1939. After World War II, the former Austrian and Polish city was incorporated into the Soviet Union, and in 1991 became part of Ukraine.
Quoting the late Nobel prizewinning poet Czesław Miłosz, Balint notes that Schulz “was born in Poland, died in Poland and the most salient characteristic of Schulz as a writer is his intimacy with the Polish language.” The Israeli author says Schulz is today revered as a “high priest of Polish modernism and Poles do have legitimate and strong connections to Schulz as someone who is an important part of their literary canon.”

Second, members of the Jewish community in Drohobych with whom Balint spoke took umbrage at the way the frescoes were snatched.
“The fact that Yad Vashem is acting on behalf of the [Israeli] state, it is basically saying neither the Ukrainians nor the remaining members of the Jewish community in Drohobych have either the means or the will to preserve Jewish heritage in western Ukraine,” says Balint. “The various Jewish people I talked to in Drohobych, [when I visited there in 2020 to research this book], viewed that as a grave insult.”
These include Dora Katznelson, an 80-year-old Jewish woman from Drohobych and a retired professor of Polish philology, who told Balint that the city’s remaining Jews, however diminished in numbers, felt disregarded by Yad Vashem’s assumption that they were not up to the task of looking after their own heritage. Katznelson called Yad Vashem’s moral claim to Schulz’s artworks a “robbery” and told Balint that she intended to take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Most countries “use artists and their cultural legacies and harness those for purposes of political legitimation,” Balint says.
But is Israel — to borrow a phrase from Balint’s book — engaging in “post-Holocaust cultural colonization”?
“It is indisputable that [with Operation Schulz] the Israelis acted in a very heavy-handed way,” Balint says. “But acting in a heavy-handed way does not ipso facto mean your actions are illegitimate. It may be that your actions are justified, even if your behavior which helps you carry out these acts of cultural repatriation happens to involve bribery and all kinds of trickery.”
“Israel is prepared to put their money and their secret service behind [efforts] to preserve the cultural legacies of the [pre-state] Jewish Diaspora,” Balint says, “even at the risk of causing diplomatic ruptures. And that to me says a great deal about how important these figures of the Jewish Diaspora are to the state.”
Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint
This article contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, The Times of Israel may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Supporting The Times of Israel isn’t a transaction for an online service, like subscribing to Netflix. The ToI Community is for people like you who care about a common good: ensuring that balanced, responsible coverage of Israel continues to be available to millions across the world, for free.
Sure, we'll remove all ads from your page and you'll unlock access to some excellent Community-only content. But your support gives you something more profound than that: the pride of joining something that really matters.

We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel