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He survived the camps, and helped Spielberg with 'Schindler's List,' but Yosef Bau may be foiled yet by Tel Aviv's real-estate boom THE PLAIN WHITE SCROLL resting on the lap of its frail white- haired owner looks innocuous enough from without. But appearances can be deceptive, and as the aged hands unfurl the roll a map is revealed. It's yellowed now and brittle with age, but unmistakable nonetheless a plan, of the Nazi work camp at Plaszow in Poland.
Once the map was stored in the offices of the sadistic SS Commandant Amon Goeth, who oversaw Plaszow. Nowadays, incredibly, it lives stashed away amidst a veritable rubble of paintings, books, sketches, old film reels, and other oddments that lay strewn around the dark two-roomed studio of the elderly Holocaust survivor who drew it over 50 years ago as a prisoner in the Plaszow camp.
Today, Yosef Bau is a frail 77-year-old, saved from a sure death by the famous list of Oskar Schindler. For the past 40 years, he's worked as an artist in the Tel Aviv studio where he now sits and which, it soon becomes apparent, is nothing less than an Aladdin's cave, crammed with what seems to be an incredible assortment of artifacts that he and his 51-year-old daughter Hadassah conjure forth from its various nooks and crannies.
The task of making order of the mountain of works and possessions accumulated over 50 years is clearly daunting, and one that Hadassah and Yosef have never undertaken. Now it seems they have no choice. On May 1, the Baus, who live together in the nearby suburb of Givatayim, face eviction from the studio, situated near the Habimah Theater in central Tel Aviv. It's valuable real estate, and a new landlord has upped the rent from 200 shekels (approximately $55) a month to $800. The amount is way beyond what they can afford, leaving Yosef nowhere to work or to store his things.
"They should be giving my father a prize for all his work," says Hadassah, who devotes...