The portrait of Boris and its companion portrait, King Christian X, are made entirely in black paint.  Gunderson created light in the paintings solely with her brushstrokes, which catch and reflect the light differently depending on the angle at which the images are viewed.  She said her intention in this body of work was to express the light of moral courage in a time of great darkness.

James E. Young, a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), wrote:  “How does an artist commemorate the heroic rescue of Jews…during the Holocaust without obscuring the much more pervasive darkness of evil that made this rescue necessary? … Karen Gunderson does not answer these questions so much as she brilliantly articulates them in her…meticulously wrought meditations on the goodness of a few whose scant light pierces, but does not dissolve, the darkness of this time