Left: Aborigines, Yosl Bergner 1946, and right: Father and sons, Yosl Bergner, 1493
Born in Vienna and raised in Warsaw, Bergner lived in Melbourne from 1937 until 1948 before migrating to Israel. He died on 18 January 2017 in his Tel Aviv home, aged 96.
The two paintings above, both held by the National Gallery of Victoria, illustrate sharply the distinctive eye he brought to Australian history. While the friends and relatives he had left behind were dying in Nazi concentration camps, Yosl Bergner showed Australians that they too were creating a Holocaust.
