EXHIBIT PLUMBS HOLOCAUST.

Byline: Terri Hardy Daily News Staff Writer

As a young artist studying in post-World War II Poland, Danuta Rothschild was forbidden by her instructors from producing artworks depicting the Holocaust.

It was a sensitive subject, a sensitive time.

But Rothschild was more taken aback in 1992, when her dark works portraying concentration camp horrors were pulled from a Directors Guild of America art exhibit in Los Angeles because, she was told, they upset visitors.

"Until recently, no one would paint on this subject, no one would show the work," said the West Hills resident. "People finally have the courage to face the past."

Now, her works are included with those of 26 other artists in one of the most significant Holocaust-theme shows assembled, being exhibited at the Finegood Art Gallery in West Hills.

"Witness and Legacy" features paintings, sculptures and multimedia installations that portray reflections of first-generation survivors of the Holocaust and second-generation sympathizers.

The exhibit was developed by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and will travel across the nation. The Finegood Gallery obtained the exhibit when the Jewish Federation Valley Alliance agreed to fund the show.

The exhibit is free and will run through April 16. The gallery is located in the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus, at 22622 Vanowen St.

Stephen Feinstein, the exhibit's curator and an expert on contemporary Holocaust art, said works on the subject have emerged only in the past two decades.

"Artists have either been too close to the subject, don't want to be typed as using Jewish themes or think it's impossible to document a subject so black," Feinstein said.

He hopes it will draw non-Jews.

Rothschild, who was born in Poland in 1951, remembers taking tours of concentration camps as a child. The camp that left an indelible mark on her psyche and her art was Maidenek, a Nazi concentration camp for children in Poland.

One of Rothschild's large paintings shows children from the camp looking through barbed wire at bodies in containers and an emaciated woman.

Many of the works in the "Witness and Legacy" exhibit are more subtle, chronicling the experiences of Jews during World War II.

Kitty Klaidman paints attics. As a child, Klaidman and her family were hidden from the Nazis in a Christian family's attic in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Klaidman's works don't portray her former residence as dark. Instead, the paintings have a mystical quality, glowing with light.

"It's definitely about hope, about redemption," Feinstein said.

Netty Vanderpol, a classmate of Anne Frank, had done needlepoint for many years. It was not until 1984 that she turned her attention to experiences in the Terezin concentration camp with needlepoint, stitching her camp "name," No. 257, into the fabric.

"She suffers from the guilt of survival," Feinstein said. "She volunteered for one of the few prisoner exchanges and survived."

In Pier Marton's "Jew" installation, people file into a cattle car and watch a video of survivors' stories. Afterward, they can write impressions on a long, black chalkboard.

Barbara Gilbert, curator for the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, called the scope of the "Witness and Legacy" exhibit "significant."

"There are some very fine works expressing the ideas of the Holocaust on a very personal level," she said.

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Photo Danuta Rothschild is one of the artists whose work is being displayed at the Finegood Art Gallery. Gus Ruelas/Daily News