At the tender age of 11, Tibor Karini had already published his own Hungarian-language newspaper, painted landscapes and composed music. His life was cut tragically short two years later when he was sent to the Auschwitz death camp and murdered there by the Nazis.
Sixty-eight years later, his sister donated his drawings to the Yad Vashem museum as part of the "Picking up the Pieces" project, Yedioth Ahronoth reported.
Tibor Karini was born in 1931 in the city of Novi Sad which belonged to Hungary at the time. He emerged as a child prodigy and spent much of his time drawing and composing music. In 1944, at the height of World War II his mother was hospitalized.
Tibor was placed under the care of his grandparents, but their lives were brutally disrupted when the Nazis shipped the three off to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Tibor's father also didn't survive the war having been sent to a forced labor camp in Russia. His mother, however did survive and upon her return home found Tibor's art work: seven notebooks containing drawings and music sheets as well as a prayer shawl and tefillin he had gotten for his Bar Mitzva.
She remarried and in 1947 gave birth to her second child, Nitza. The family made aliyah two years later bringing with them Tibor's mementos.
"A few weeks ago I looked at photographs of my parents. I didn’t look, I watched. I saw the sadness in their eyes, sadness for the loss," Nitza told Yedioth Ahronoth.
"I then decided to give the items to Yad Vashem for safe keeping."
Yad Vashem in conjunction with Yedioth Ahronoth continues its "Picking up the Pieces" project aimed at locating and collecting items belonging to Holocaust survivors.
- Receive Ynetnews updates
directly to your desktop