A mural of Abram Cytryn on Starosikawska 18, created by artists Piotr Saul and Damian Idzikowski in 2016. It exemplifies Łódź street art and tells the history of the city through a portrait of a young poet from the Łódź ghetto.
On the wall of a building at ul. Starosikawska 18 in the Bałuty district of Łódź, a black and white portrait of Abram Cytryn was painted in 2016. The young poet lived in the Łódź ghetto. The mural is part of the series "Dzieci Bałut - murale pamięci" [Children of Bałuty - memorial murals], created by Piotr Saul and Damian Idzikowski.
Abram Cytryn was born on 30 May 1927 in Łódź, into a Jewish family, as the son of industrialist Jakub Szymon Cytryn. He wrote poetry and prose from the age of eight, and during his time in the Łódź ghetto he left behind 24 notebooks filled with poems and stories. He died in 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Cytryn's literary legacy, his manuscripts, is held today at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
The Bałuty district is the area where, during the German occupation, the Łódź ghetto operated, known by the Germans as Litzmannstadt Ghetto. It was here that Abram Cytryn spent the last years of his life before deportation to a concentration camp. Portraits such as his in the "Dzieci Bałut" series serve to commemorate the children who lived in this part of the city before the Holocaust.
The project of murals commemorating children of the Łódź ghetto began in 2012, on the seventieth anniversary of the Wielka Szpera [Great Eviction], the mass deportation of children, the sick and the elderly from the ghetto in 1942. The concept for the series was created by Katarzyna Tośta. By 2016, when the portrait of Abram Cytryn was being created, approximately 21 murals from this cycle had been painted, and by 2018 their number exceeded 28.
Each portrait in the series is created on the basis of archival photographs and depicts a child in black and white, without additional colours. The subjects of the murals are Jewish children from the Łódź ghetto, as well as Polish and Roma children held in camps on the territory of occupied Poland. The series is funded by the Museum of the History of Poland.
The murals are created by Piotr Saul, instructor at the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, and Damian Idzikowski, assistant in the Workshop of Basic Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. Among other portraits by the same artistic duo in Łódź are, among others, mural Jewish Boy and mural Girl from the Roma Camp.
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