In the summer of 1944, many Jewish families in newly Nazi-occupied Budapest received postcards from their deported loved ones. “I am doing fine,” the postcards read. “I am working.” “I have arrived safely. I have got work in my occupation.” “We are doing fine. Follow us here!” Each cheery card was postmarked Waldsee.

In fact, the cards were mailed from Auschwitz. They were dictated by SS officers to prisoners, often just before they entered gas chambers. Waldsee did not exist as portrayed, although if families consulted a map, they would find small towns with that name in Austria and Switzerland.

In an exhibit opening tonight at Hebrew Union College, dozens of contemporary artists from America and Europe offer their own meditations on the fiction of Waldsee. The only instruction from the show’s curators was that the work should be in the 5-inch-by-7-inch form of a postcard (artists being artistic, not all of them kept precisely to the rules). The results include Anton Wurth’s lined postcard with a blank square in the center, William Kentridge’s Johannesburg map laid over a drawing of Waldsee, Lorelei and Alex Gruss’s woodcut of a group who appears to be prisoners waiting for rescue, and Archie Rand’s ink drawing seen above.

“How many different ways are there to tell the same story? You tell it always through your own lens,” said curator Laura Kruger. “This show is a marriage of personal perspective and history.”

Ms. Kruger recruited the 30 or so American artists represented in the show, including Judy Chicago, Donald Woodman, Julie Dermansky, and Ida Appelbroog. New York photographer Sylvia Plachy, who contributed a stark image of two hanging prison uniforms, left Budapest at 13 in 1956.

The Hungarian brothers Andras and Laszlo Borocz gathered most of the Hungarian artists, including Zsuzsa Lorant, Gabor Kerekes, and Bea Rosko. Another version of the exhibit has been shown this year in Budapest and Berlin.

Ms. Kruger said that these pieces have a different tone than the American contributions. “Some of the European work is totally despairing. In the American work, there are other emotions. It’s not only about despair. … The focus is more on people than on anonymity.”

The truth about Waldsee finally came out during the Nuremberg Trials, with the testimony of Hitler’s secretary, Rudolph Hess. “On their arrival they were given picture postcards bearing the post office address of ‘Waldsee,’ a place that did not exist … I myself saw the cards in question, and the Schreiberinnen, that is, the secretaries of the block, were instructed to distribute them among the internees in order to post them to their families,” he said. “I know that whole families arrived as a result of those postcards.”

Some in Budapest were spared by the quick thinking of their correspondents. A leader of the Hungarian Jewish Council, Fulop Freudiger, participated in distributing the cards in Budapest. He realized the truth only when he received his own card from two deported friends, Jozsef and Samuel Stern, who signed their names as Joseph R’evim and Samuel Blimalbiscj – the Hebrew words for “hungry” and “without clothing.”

“Waldsee-1944”: Reception: Tonight, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Exhibit: Today through Thursday, August 19, Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m., Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, 1 W. 4th St., between Broadway and Mercer Street, 212-824-2205, free. Note: A photo I.D. is required for entry.