Toby Knobel Fluek

Toby Knobel Fluek was born in Czernica, Poland, 1920. She and her mother were the only members of the family to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland during the years of the Holocaust. She chronicled her family life, and of townspeople, and survival, in a poor, rural village in artworks published in 2 books: “Memories of my life in a Polish village, 1930-49” (pub. by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990, ISBN 978-0394586175); and “Passover As I Remember It” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, ISBN 978-0679838760). Her daughter assisted with the writing of the text of the Passover book.

After Fluek passed in 2011, her daughter donated her mom’s art, some 500 artworks, to the Florida Holocaust Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Mrs. Fluek’s paintings are beautifully painted; many are like jewels. Her drawings, more like sketches, aren’t as polished, but each, too, offer insight into her life and that of the Jewish communities of rural Poland that are now vanished.