Following increasing anti-Semitism in his native Poland, Herman left for Brussels in 1938, from where, following the outbreak of the Second World War, and then the German Occupation of Brussels in May 1940, he was forced to flee via southern France. He arrived in Glasgow in 1940, where he began a series of nostalgic drawings, at first often light-hearted and humorous, variously depicting family life, Jewish customs and the everyday street life of his native city, as an evocation of a lost Warsaw. After receiving the news that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, however, the series darkened to include images of pogroms - cycles of destruction, loss and grief.

This work is reminiscent of earlier depictions of the artist's parents. The family connection is further suggested by Herman's moving inscription of the drawing as a birthday gift to his friend, when he labelled it as 'a fragment of myself'.