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jerusalem  | A Gestapo officer forced Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz to paint fairy tale characters on the walls of a nursery in an occupied Polish village in 1941. A Nazi sergeant shot and killed Schulz a year later, and his colorful murals were forgotten for decades.

Israel’s Holocaust museum presented Schulz’s paintings last month, eight years after their discovery sparked a diplomatic row over their ownership.

The exhibit “Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion” includes fragments of three murals depicting dwarfs, princesses, horses and carriages along with images evoking Schulz’s struggles during the Holocaust.

Schulz was born in Drohobych, a village that was then part of Poland and is now in Ukraine. After the village was occupied by Nazi troops in World War II, Gestapo officer Felix Landau took in Schulz as a forced laborer.

Landau admired Schulz’s work. He offered him protection and ordered him to illustrate the walls of his young son’s nursery with images of Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel.

On Nov. 19, 1942, Schulz was carrying a loaf of bread on the street when a Nazi rival of Landau’s shot him down, allegedly in retaliation for Landau’s killing of that man’s so-called “personal Jew.” Schulz was among 230 Jews killed in Drohobych that day and one of the nearly 15,000 slain in the town during the Nazi occupation. Some 400 Jews survived, and only a few remain in Drohobych.

The murals were neglected until 2001, when a former Schulz pupil discovered them in Landau’s old villa and Ukrainian and Polish art experts declared them to be Schulz originals. With permission from the family that lived in the home, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum took away fragments of the murals to save them from further decay.

Since their arrival in Israel eight years ago they have undergone professional conservation and restoration.

Ukraine claimed that removing the works was a crime and launched a criminal probe against cultural officials for allowing the murals to be removed.

The dispute was settled last year; Israel recognized the Schulz works as the property and cultural wealth of Ukraine, and the Drohobychyna Museum in Ukraine agreed to give them to Yad Vashem on long-term loan.

Schulz is best known for two collections of short stories. Yad Vashem Senior Art Curator Yehudit Shendar said his writings were underappreciated during his lifetime, but he is revered in literary circles as the “Polish Kafka.” His works  inspired generations of writers, including the award-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman.

Shendar said that despite being forced to paint, Schulz managed to maintain his distinctive style, sneaking in images of his loved ones and his trademark self-portraits.

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