Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Heinz Geiringer was a Jewish teenager in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded the city in 1940. For two years, the family lived in hiding, with Heinz’s sister and mother separating from him and his father. To pass his days, Heinz began to paint, and hid the paintings under the attic floorboards of the house of the Dutch family that sheltered them.

Discovered by the Nazis in 1944, the family was sent to Auschwitz; Heinz told his sister Eva about the paintings as they were being transported to the camp in a railroad cattle car. She and her mother survived, rescued by Russian soldiers when the war ended, but he and his father did not.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum identifies this painting as a self-portrait.