Searching for Disney in the Dark: How Artists Took Inspiration from Disney During the Holocaust

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

Fifteen-year-old Henri Kichka probably never imagined when he painted a scene from the animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that he would soon lose all of his family members in the aftermath of World War II.

The scene, which features miniature characters from the 1937 Disney classic trudging along the top of a fallen tree, is just one of several Disney-inspired artworks that will be on display at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. The artifacts will be housed in the museum’s new Moshal Shoah Legacy Campus and the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center, which opens Monday in Jerusalem.

Against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism and the German occupation of Belgium, Kichka painted this playful work on March 8, 1941, “finding solace in the magic of fairy tales,” according to Yad Vashem. A few months later, Nazi soldiers deported his mother, sister, and aunt to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where they later perished.

“The Holocaust was a time of unimaginable suffering and loss, but in the midst of this darkness, many found solace and a way to preserve their humanity through art. This form of expression became a coping mechanism and a way to hope for better times,” said Simmy Allen, Yad Vashem’s head of international media.

Kichka, who was able to reclaim his works after the war, is one of many artists who incorporated Disney’s whimsical themes into their work despite the chaos that raged on Europe’s doorstep from 1936 to 1945. During World War II, Hitler’s Nazi regime murdered six million Jews as well as countless others, including Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled and more.

Sarika “Sarah” Kalderon was one of those victims. Born in 1923 in Belgrade, Kalderon kept a diary from 1936 to 1940, filled with drawings of Mickey Mouse hurtling down a snowy slope and an angry Donald Duck who appeared to be yelling at someone. Donated by her cousin to the Israeli Holocaust Museum, the diary includes drawings, blessings, dedications and poems, written by friends and family members in Serbian, Croatian, French and Hebrew, according to Yad Vashem. Kalderon was killed in 1942 during the Holocaust.

Bruno Schulz is perhaps one of Disney’s most famous artists. A Polish writer and artist, he was captured when the Nazis occupied his hometown of Drohobych, now in Ukraine, but was saved from the death camps when SS soldier Felix Landau, who had commandeered a house in Drohobych, ordered him to paint fairy-tale-themed murals on the walls of the house’s nursery and elsewhere.

Schulz’s paintings “are a poignant reminder of how art can serve as both an act of resistance and a means of survival,” according to Yad Vashem. One of Schulz’s murals, “Snow White with Dwarves,” is on display at the Holocaust Art Museum.

Other Disney-inspired artworks include a painted urn created by Yugoslavian artist Lili Kashtichker depicting the mischievous puppet Pinocchio. In the days before her deportation to Auschwitz, Kashtichker hid her family’s documents and photos in the urn and buried it.

While imprisoned at Auschwitz and then at the Ober-Hohenelbe concentration camp, Kashtichker refused to let despair extinguish her enthusiasm for art. She organized painting, poetry and short story writing competitions with other prisoners, creating a sense of community and creativity despite the death around them, according to Yad Vashem. Kashtichker eventually returned after the war to retrieve the urn and brought it and other works back to Israel, where she immigrated after 1948.

“As we reflect on this collection of Holocaust artifacts depicting Disney characters, it is truly remarkable how prevalent a common motif is,” said Yad Vashem’s Allen. “The most impressive aspect of this collection is how individuals who were otherwise unrelated and geographically dispersed were drawn to these iconic images.”

“Despite the complexity and uncertainty of life at this time, the enduring power of human imagination shines through in these objects,” Allen added. “They are a powerful reminder that creativity and hope can persist even in the darkest of times.”