‘I will finish your work’: one woman’s fight for the Jewish art and letters her mother saved from the Nazis

Judy King (second from right) and her cousin Peter (right) with staff from the Weiner Holocaust Library as they prepare to open Peter Kien’s suitcase. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

They survived the Nazis, were confiscated by the communists, and for the last three decades they have been jealously guarded, bound in red tape, by a museum in the Czech Republic. Due to the attentions of an overzealous Czech customs guard and the vagaries of the British weather, a happy conclusion had been in doubt to the very end.

But last Thursday a small suitcase filled with 681 drawings, love letters, poems and manuscripts created by the Jewish artist and poet Peter Kien in the Theresienstadt ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1944 finally made a blustery landing at Heathrow.