A suitcase containing 681 drawings, love letters, poems, and manuscripts by Jewish artist and poet Peter Kien, created in the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1941 to 1944, has finally arrived in London. The caravan of precious items landed at Heathrow last Thursday after decades of being held under communist control in the Czech Republic. Kien’s lover, Helga Wolfenstein, was given the suitcase just before Kien was deported to Auschwitz and murdered at 25. The suitcase was hidden in the ghetto’s infectious diseases ward to protect it from the Nazis. After liberation in 1945, Wolfenstein fled Prague but left the suitcase with her aunt, Julia Fleischerova. In the 1970s, a communist informant discovered the suitcase’s contents. Wolfenstein was forced to hand it over or lose her pension. The suitcase was then locked away by the Terezín Memorial museum. After the communist regime fell in 1989, Wolfenstein agreed to a one-time exhibition but was denied the suitcase’s return. For 33 years, Wolfenstein fought to get the suitcase back. Before she died in 2003, she made her daughter Judy King promise to continue the struggle. King took over the fight, finally working with the museum in 2017. It took nearly ten more years of negotiations and international support to free the suitcase, considered a national treasure. King produced a notarized document proving ownership, but customs still delayed its exit. Last week, after a final hurdle at customs and bad weather in London, the suitcase arrived safely at the Wiener Holocaust Library. Howard Falksohn, senior archivist at the library, thanked King for donating the precious artifacts. These works now join nearly 100 other Kien pieces smuggled out during the communist era and stored in the library’s archive. The arrival comes just before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. King said her mother, a British citizen and Anglophile, would be "thrilled to see these artworks preserved and honored in London."