• Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Charlotte Salomon®

Charlotte Salomon spent most of 1941 locked in a room in La Belle Aurore, a hotel in Saint Jean Cap Ferrat in the south of France, painting. She was trying to distract herself from the suicidal depression that plagued her family—it had claimed her mother, the aunt for whom she was named, and, most recently, her grandmother—and the impending Nazi invasion. She was 24 years old. Her main subject was her own life. Over the course of 18 months, she produced more than 1,300 gouache paintings, edited down to 769, that, taken together, were intended to be a singespiel, a play with music: she indicated the accompanying songs on the back of the drawings or on transparent overlays. She called it Life? Or Theater? Just before she was deported to Drancy concentration camp in 1943, she gave the entire project to a non-Jewish friend known only as Dr. Moridis. “Keep it safe,” she told him. “It is my whole life.”

Charlotte was born in Berlin. Her father was a prominent surgeon who invented a procedure to fix gastric ulcers, and her mother was a nurse; the two met in an army hospital during World War I. The family was fully assimilated. They celebrated Christmas, and during a trip to Rome, attended an audience with the Pope. (Charlotte’s depiction shows the Pope asking, “What are all these little Jews doing here?”) Charlotte’s mother was frequently depressed—all of Charlotte’s paintings show her lying in bed, telling little Charlotte about how she would write her letters from heaven. She killed herself when Charlotte was nine by jumping out a window, although Charlotte didn’t find out the truth until much later; she’d been told it was influenza.

“The important thing about Life? Or Theater? is the quality of the drawings,” says Cahen. “Charlotte was trained as an artist at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. She studied with the German expressionists like Max Beckmann. She used the same colors, there were a lot of similarities. But [Life? Or Theater?] became a total artwork, a combination of music and paintings and story. She used the technique of an animation artist. She was very much before her time.”

Salomon’s father and stepmother survived the war, including two incarcerations in concentration camps. In Life? Or Theater? Paulinka uses her “intelligence and charm” to rescue her husband from Sachsenburg. It’s unclear what, exactly, that entailed, but it was a “great effort.” Later, says Cahen, they escaped Westerbork under the pretext that Dr. Salomon needed to return to Amsterdam to collect his medical equipment in order to help the Nazis with their sterilization experiments. Instead they went into hiding. In 1947, they made their way to the south of France to find out what had become of Charlotte. They found Moore, who had returned the previous year and collected Salomon’s artwork from Dr. Moridis. The Salomons took the paintings back to Amsterdam. They sealed them in archival boxes and didn’t look at them for the next ten years.