Can something horrible also be beautiful? As seen in the Berlin exhibition "Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection," a number of artists managed to document life in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos and create great art even during one of humanity's greatest tragedies. Pictured: "A Street in Łódź Ghetto" by Josef Kowner, who survived the Holocaust.

For the first time, 100 works from the Yad Vashem memorial center in Israel are on display at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Of the 50 artists included, 24 were murdered by the Nazis. Among the victims is prominent artist Felix Nussbaum, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. His famous painting, "The Refugee," was painted in 1939 in Brussels and reveals the desperation of exile.

Works by Charlotte Salomon have been shown elsewhere in Germany as well. In a collection of over 700 individual works, titled "Life? or Theater?: A Song-play," Salomon explored her own tragic life story as a Jew in Berlin. In 1943, she was deported from southern France, where she had found exile, to Auschwitz, where she was murdered immediately upon arrival. She was pregnant at the time.

Nelly Toll's story is less well known. She and her mother survived the Holocaust in what was then the Polish city of Lwów because they were hidden by Christian friends. Locked in her room, Toll drew artworks including this gouache, "Girls in the Field." Now 81, the artist has traveled from her home in the United States to attend the opening of the Berlin exhibition.

Leo Breuer from Bonn fought for the German Kaiser in World War I. In 1934, one year after Hitler rose to power, he immigrated to The Hague and then to Brussels, where he was able to work as a painter and exhibit his work. In 1940, he was taken to the St. Cyprien internment camp in France, and then to the camp in Gurs, where he documented his time there in water colors. Breuer died in 1975 in Bonn.

In Gurs, Leo Breuer created stage designs for the camp cabaret together with photographer and artist Karl Robert Bodek. The two also worked together on greeting cards and other pieces of art - until 1941. That's when Bodek was deported to the camp in Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence and then to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1942.

Bedřich Fritta headed the office at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where official propaganda material was produced. But Fritta and his colleagues also secretly drew images of the horrors of the Nazi ghettos. In 1944, their subversion was discovered. Fritta died in Auschwitz. After Theresienstadt was liberated, 200 of his works were found hidden in the walls and buried in the ground.

Leo Haas helped Fritta create countless works depicting life in the concentration camp. In Sachsenhausen, he was ordered to create counterfeit bills in the currencies of the Allies ("Operation Bernhard"). He survived and later adopted Tomáš, Fritta's son. After the war, Haas found 400 of his hidden works in Theresienstadt.

Pavel Fantl belonged to the artists' circle at Theresienstadt as well. As a medical doctor he also ran the typhus clinic in the camp. Like Fritta, his cover was also blown and he was tortured and sent to Auschwitz. In January 1945, he was shot and killed during a death march. Around 80 of his drawings were smuggled out of Theresienstadt.

Jacob Lipschitz taught at the art institute in Vilnius before the war. In 1941, he was forced to move to the ghetto in Kaunus, where he joined a group of artists that secretly documented life there. Lipschitz died in March 1945 in the Kaufering concentration camp. After the war, his wife and daughter went back to the Kaunus ghetto and recovered the pictures he had hidden in a cemetery.

The images in the exhibition, which runs through April 3 in Berlin's German Historical Museum, document the inconsolability and brutality of life in Nazi camps. But they also show how artists managed to create a world apart from the horrific deeds of their captors. Pictured is Moritz Müller's "Roofs in Winter."

A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.

The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.

Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.

Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.

The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.

Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.

Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.

In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.

Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.