"He never sold a painting in his life, he lived in hovels, and yet he died worth around $100 million," says Anthony Williams, head of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, during a press preview for Boris Lurie: The Complete Works. There's nothing left to do except try. "He was a complicated man," he adds later, sighing.

Boris Lurie was a painter, illustrator, sculptor, diarist, co-founder of the No!art movement, and concentration camp survivor whose work is on exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in lower Manhattan.

The display is the museum's first contemporary art presentation in its 24-year existence. The nearly 100 pieces, most of which were created in a frenzy in 1946 and have since been dubbed Lurie's "War Series," sit alongside the museum's core collection of Holocaust testimony and Judaica, a memorial garden designed by Andy Goldsworthy, and the home of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the world's longest continuously producing Yiddish theater company, and the world's longest continuously producing theater company.

"This is a different kind of testimony," Museum president Jack Klinger says of the pictures on exhibit, which are often terrifying and unsettling.

Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, but his family moved to Riga, Latvia, when he was two years old. When he was 16, the Nazis seized the city, and after a brief stay in the Riga ghetto, his mother, grandmother, sister, and lover were among the 25,000 people killed in the Rumbula forest.

Boris and his father were forced to work as slave workers in industries (notably for Lenta, which produced luxury items for the Nazis), then transported to the Salaspils concentration camp outside Riga, then to Stutthof outside Danzig via a perilous ferry journey, and ultimately to Buchenwald. They toiled as workers in the camps until they were freed. Boris served in the US Counter Intelligence Corps after the war and subsequently moved to New York City.

Despite having virtually little professional creative experience, he immersed himself into his work right away. Nothing to Do But Try's center part contains a sequence of hurriedly made drawings ripped from notebooks, many of which, curator Sarah Softness notes, were kept secret for much of the artist's life. Even writing on "a napkin stained with soy sauce" is included in the eclectic collection.

The pictures are flashes of memory from his late youth, interspersed with Nazi horrors like as burning buildings, armed soldiers, and forced transportation. Elongated arms (which might be a Hitler salute or a loved one reaching out to make contact), faceless guys with an X etched on their backs, and spooky, unsettling trees with knotty branches that seem ready to grab someone off the ground are among the recurrent motifs.

The paintings from this time period elicit a palpable sense of foreboding. With its black swirling sky and hell-like rust-colored terrain, Concentration Camp's Roll Call shows a line-up of tortured souls, their faces twisted beyond human recognition. (One staring straight at the spectator resembles Nosferatu from the original Max Schreck film.)

Portrait of My Mother Before Shooting, done in a beige monotone, just ambiguous enough to be out of reach, is similarly stunning - as if the title weren't enough. Memorabilia in the show indicates that she did all she could to keep the family together despite the odds, including throwing a dinner party the night before the Lurie women were murdered. The picture Untitled (37 Ludzas Street), the family's final house (and near to his girlfriend's), is accompanied by the note that Lurie "always hated banquets" for the rest of his life.

A fascinating unnamed painting from 1970 that works in conversation with his mother's picture is among the pieces that followed War Series in this exhibition. The human face is fuzzy and deformed, alien and skeleton, and is accented with pale blue, presumably indicating an adult clinging to the final memory of a loved one stolen from him when still young.

There are also many big photos from Lurie's journey to Riga in 1975, when he visited the Rumbula murder site. Because his hands were shaking as he went through the eerie region, the pictures are a bit off-kilter. The Ax Series, a collection of wooden stumps and antique tools, is the most recent piece in the exhibition, and it is likely a reflection of the labor he and his father performed to survive in Nazi camps.

Lurie's work with the No!art group, a radical and confrontational movement that started in 1959, is mostly overlooked in this exhibition. The Doom Show and The Vulgar Show were two of its most famous presentations. According to Anthony Williams of the Lurie Art Foundation, getting Lurie's Shit Sculpture past customs to a recent exhibition in Berlin was a challenge.

The Foundation, which was established in 2009, one year after the artist's death, is currently working to define Lurie's place in the twentieth-century art landscape. Lurie was very rich at the end of his life, while living in misery - his shabby East Village apartment is characterized as "my New York surrogate Riga ghetto."

This was initially owing to certain real estate investments in New York. "He had a piece of the Ansonia," Williams recalls, alluding to the opulent Upper West Side apartment building that formerly housed the fabled Continental Baths in its basement.

Later, he became interested in penny stocks, concentrating on mobile technologies in developing countries. This was a huge success, which explains his good wealth at the time of his death.

According to Williams, he never sold "a substantial" piece of art throughout his career, and he even discouraged purchasers when a transaction was about to complete. Some of his acquaintances questioned whether he was attempting to replicate his life at Buchenwald by sleeping during the day and working at night.

"This exhibition really considers his devastating emotional life and how he exited in the world – all inescapably informed by his trauma," explains curator Sara Softness.

Thanks to Jordan Hoffman at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.