Next to him we see Peter Mikhalev, another member of the Sobranie, who with Peshev participated in the efforts of the Kyustendil delegation, which worked tirelessly to oppose the deportations; we then encounter Liliana Panitza, who betrayed her employer and lover, Alexander Belev, in order to alert the Jews of Bulgaria to their already-decided fate.  Next to her stands Ekaterina Karavelova, who used her connections as the widow of an eminent statesman to help the Jewish people in every way she could; and finally we see Princess Evdokia, sister of Tsar Boris, another great friend of the Jewish people.  Each of these faces gazes out at us with a moral candor and strength that irresistibly entice us into speculation about the mystery and drama of individual conscience.  And the group as a whole speaks for all the hundreds and thousands of other Bulgarians who joined hands and hearts in saving their Jewish friends, neighbors and co-workers from what everyone in Bulgaria knew, without euphemism, and openly acknowledged to be genocidal extermination.

In Friendships, a drawing in charcoal, two Jewish girls, forced to wear the Jewish star as a consequence of the odious Law for the Defence of the Nation, walk arm-in-arm, in public, with Bulgarian friends who are not afraid to be seen with them.  These young women stride forward toward the viewer, defying injustice and inhumanity, proclaiming through their sturdy young legs, their linked arms, and their strong young bodies the concrete reality of justice and integrity—not as abstractions, but as ideals incarnated in the youth and beauty of the young women themselves.  The image is based on a true story told to Gunderson by Philip Dimitrov, former Bulgarian prime minister and ambassador to the United States, whose mother is the figure on the right and who actually did link arms, in public, with her Jewish friends.

In all of the works, both drawings and paintings, Gunderson has engaged in an approach she herself has termed “haptic”— that is, involved with the sense of touch.  His Decision is a drawing in which Tsar Boris stands, arms crossed, at a window at the royal palace, his back to German envoy, SS Hauptsturmführer Theodore Dannecker (active in the “Final Solution” in France), in black, and a shadowy figure representing simply a generic Nazi, both of whom, we assume, have come in anger and impatience to the royal palace to insist that the tsar proceed with the scheduled (and promised) deportations of the Jews.