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The sketch is made in ink, as well as green, blue and red watercolours, on the reverse there is a portrait of a woman painted in ink. The sketch shows a composition with a contour drawing of human figures with added colour spots made in watercolour.

This is one of the first sketches for a large-format painting (223 × 393 cm) in the collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum in Jerusalem, which was created in the years 1957–1964 in Paris.

From behind the depiction of a biblical angel climbing a ladder there emerges the figure of a teenage boy with a yellow Star of David patch. The boy, presumably Isaac himself, a survivor of the sacrifice (replicating a gesture from the 1955 Ghetto painting), extends his hand with a candle, making the left part of the composition visible. He is painted using dark colours because he was in the darkest of realities. An equally dark group of soldiers positioned in the right-hand part of the painting aim their rifles at a pair of lovers embracing and the angel (another direct reference to Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Picasso’s Massacre in Korea). Celnikier thus shows the destruction of the entire Jewish tradition, which he derives from the Torah through a reference to Jacob’s dream (Gen 28: 12–15).

The woman in the centre of the painting also holds candles; she is still on the side of the living, a source of warm light, certainly linking the viewer to tradition. Meanwhile, in the zone of darkness and death, there is a woman sitting on the ground with a dead child in her arms and Isaac himself, who is on the border between darkness and light. The slightly raised right leg of the woman sitting in the dark, as well as the use of red paint, suggest a recent birth. Although the woman is holding a stillborn foetus in her arms, the birth is probably not over yet. In his autobiography, the artist indicated that the two female figures depicted in Ghetto with an Angel were inspired by Gina Frydman. Gina, separated by the Germans from your four-year-old child, whose gender is not even known, threw herself at the German man with a knife as a result of the injustice she had suffered. For Celnikier, Gina Frydman is a symbol of beauty and courage, in his paintings and graphics he will present her as the biblical Judith:

Gina, 13 years my senior, became my companion a month later. She stood out for her exceptional beauty. People in the ghetto would turn around at the sight of her, as if looking for traces of themselves in her. She became the guiding thread of my spirituality, awakening masculine sensuality in me where death reigned. Abraham was taken away at dawn on 3 July 1941. For months, death was omnipresent; she almost never told me about it. Nor about their life; yet it was as if she did. The Germans were killing us and she came to me naked. The slightest crumb of a glance counted. This is how I drew her 20 years later, with her body in a standing position, in Ghetto with an Angel (Yad Vashem) and, on the same canvas, half-lying, en face, with a child on top of her. She will return, alongside my mother and sister, also alone, in several of my paintings and engravings.

(Isaak Celnikier, Moja lektura Rembrandta (English: My Reading of Rembrandt), translated from French into Polish by Katarzyna Rodrigo-Pereira, The typescript is kept in Isaac Celnikier’s family archive, pp. 76–77)

The image of a mother in a sitting position with a child is a recurring motif already explored by Celnikier in the illustration to the short story Di tzvey muters / Two Mothers by Awrom Rejzen (see MŻIH A-1576/19). Celnikier, influenced by reading the story about a woman who, as a result of the death of her child, loses her mind and ends up in a psychiatric hospital, reminded the artist of Gina's story. In this reading, the illustration for Two Mothers (created in 1957) would be a sketch of the figure of a mother with a dead child from the painting Ghetto with an Angel (made in the years 1958–1964), and the figure of the winged child the seed of the idea of ​​the angel from the same painting.

Despite the tragedy depicted in the painting, it also features places of beauty and hope. This coincides with the artist’s clear distinction between the realities of the ghetto and of death camps. He pointed out that while love, faith and religiosity were still possible in ghettos, there was no longer any God or love in camps.

Celnikier wrote about his work on this piece:

I’ve had periods of complete alienation, complete detachment from reality. I lived outside Paris in Saint-Cloud, in very difficult material conditions. I stopped painting, I lost faith in the possibilities of painting. […] When painting, I sought respite through the opposition of love and barbarism. […] These canvases sum up my various encounters with ghetto Jews who, while experiencing unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the Nazis, remained for me a symbol of humanity, innocence and vulnerability.

(Isaac Celnikier, “Od Artysty”, in Izaak Celnikier: malarstwo, rysunek, grafika. Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, styczeń-marzec 2005 / Isaac Celnikier: peintures, dessins, gravures. Musée National de Cracovie, janvier-mars 2005, Barbara Leszczyńska-Cyganik, Joanna Boniecka, eds., Kraków 2005, p. 116)

The image of a mother in a sitting position with a child is a recurring motif already explored by Celnikier in the illustration to the short story Di tzvey muters / Two Mothers by Awrom Rejzen (see MŻIH A-1576/19). Celnikier, influenced by reading the story about a woman who, as a result of the death of her child, loses her mind and ends up in a psychiatric hospital, reminded the artist of Gina's story. In this reading, the illustration for Two Mothers (created in 1957) would be a sketch of the figure of a mother with a dead child from the painting Getto z aniołem (made in the years 1958–1964), and the figure of the winged child the seed of the idea of ​​the angel from the same painting.

The composition of the painting also refers to Picasso's Minotauromachy, which Celnikier redrew while working on Ghetto with an Angel (a sketch based on Minotauromachy is in the artist's family collection in Ivry-sur-Seine). Celnikier consciously draws on the compositions of the great masters of European painting to introduce the subject of the Holocaust into the canon of art. As he wrote in his autobiography:

World War II did not have its Goya. In silence, as if the talk was about theft, the Shoah does not exist in what one could call “world art.” And were we to judge this era through world art, we wouldn’t have learned anything. This absence from art condemns the Shoah to oblivion and shame, and it does so through its own inability.

(Isaak Celnikier, Moja lektura Rembrandta (English: My Reading of Rembrandt), translated from French into Polish by Katarzyna Rodrigo-Pereira, The typescript is kept in Isaac Celnikier’s family archive, p. 8)