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."