House and trees, reflected in water 1940s

Multiple white houses with peaked roofs tucked among a forest of pine trees on the shore of a lake. Signed on back.Digital imageBorn in Bruenn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czechoslovakia) in 1900, Norbert Troller served as a soldier in World War I, spending time as a prisoner-of-war in Italy. After the war, he studied architecture in Brno and Vienna and worked as an architect in Brno until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, where he worked as an architect for the Jewish self-administration of the camp, and produced works of art as well. In 1944, he was imprisoned by the Gestapo, and was sent to Auschwitz later that year. After liberation, he lived briefly in Kraków, and then reopened his architectural business in Prague and Brno. He emigrated to the United States in 1948 and worked for the National Jewish Welfare Board in New York designing Jewish community centers, before opening his own practice. He died in 1984