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The term “camp art” may seem out of place, as concentration and extermination camps were designed to reduce human beings to numbers — to dehumanise them. And yet, in defiance of the logic of the system, drawings, paintings, poems, songs, and even theatrical performances were created there. This artistic output constitutes one of the most powerful testimonies of the twentieth century and stands as evidence that culture can become the last form of freedom.

Art created in concentration camps includes both works produced on commission for the Schutzstaffel (SS) and displayed in the Lagermuseum established by the Germans, as well as illegal works that prisoners created secretly, in hiding. In this context, art is understood both as an expression of intense emotions and as a strategy of survival. A significant number of these works were created anonymously; nevertheless, the names of some artists are known. Among them are, for example, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann, Maja Berezowska, Imre Holló, as well as Esther Lurie and Dinah Gottliebová-Babbitt.

The origins of camp art

There were many reasons for the development of camp art, and it emerged along multiple paths. This artistic production did not arise as an organised artistic movement; rather, it grew out of three overlapping sources.

The first was a powerful need to bear witness and to document crimes. Many prisoners wanted to “leave a trace” — to describe a reality the outside world might not believe. Not all illegal artistic activity had a documentary purpose, however. Many works were created out of the prisoners’ own psychological and emotional needs.

The second reason was psychological survival, as artistic creation could serve as a means of preserving one’s identity. It functioned as a remedy for dehumanisation and as a form of escape from everyday camp reality. This can be understood as a need for emotional regulation, symbolisation, and the recovery of a sense of agency.

The third cause of the development of camp art was coercion and its use as an instrument of power. In many cases, artworks were produced on commission or under the supervision of the perpetrators. Workshops existed in the camps (for example, for technical drawings, charts, or signage), and artistic talent could become a form of currency, offering extra bread, lighter work, or a chance of survival — at the cost of dependence and profound moral dilemmas.

Why did they create? Motives and functions of camp art

Camp art constitutes a distinct phenomenon and can be attributed multiple functions. Above all, thanks to camp artists, it was possible to document everyday life in the camps. After the end of the Second World War, these works became a basis for indictments and for proving the guilt of the perpetrators. Drawings depicting selections, roll calls, barracks, physical exhaustion, and the “everyday reality” of violence serve as visual testimonies to brutality. They were often created in hiding, on scraps of paper, sometimes using makeshift tools. Many camp artists devoted themselves with particular care to creating portraits of loved ones or landscapes. This group of works also includes religious motifs and memories of the family home. This strand of artistic production was intended to preserve the memory of the world “before” the Second World War.

Yet this was not all. Songs, satires, and short performances fostered a sense of connection and contributed to the rebuilding of community — something the camp systemically sought to destroy. Undoubtedly, art also functioned as a tool of survival, understood not only metaphorically but quite literally: in exchange for a portrait, a decorative card, a sign, or a drawing, one could receive bread, soup, or shoes. Thus, “barter exchange” flourished. In accordance with the camp economy, artworks became resources that carried a certain value and functioned as a form of currency.

It should also be remembered that camp authorities tolerated or commissioned certain forms of artistic production—decorations, posters, and performances intended to mask reality or to organise camp life in a manner deemed desirable. In some places, prisoners were forced to create works for the SS, which exploited their artistic skills for a variety of purposes. These included instructional drawings, scale models of planned camp expansions, as well as documentation of diseases and medical experiments. Prisoners also produced works for the private use of SS men, such as portraits, landscapes, greeting cards, and decorative objects (including platters and wooden caskets), often adorned with symbols of the Third Reich. They likewise created decorations for camp authorities, for example paintings and sculptures used to furnish SS offices and living quarters (including the offices of Commandant Rudolf Höss). At this point, it is worth mentioning the Lagermuseum at Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, established in the autumn of 1941 on the initiative of Commandant Höss. It represented the most striking manifestation of this system. The Lagermuseum fulfilled a triple, macabre function: as an artistic workshop commissioning works from a group of several talented prisoners; as a storehouse and “gallery,” where both commissioned works and items looted from deportees (such as Jewish prayer books, tallitot, and coins) were collected; and as a tool of propaganda.

The Lagermuseum was intended to demonstrate that prisoners were performing work “appropriate to their education” and was occasionally shown to official delegations. Artists involved in its activities included, among others, Franciszek Targosz, Władysław Baworski, Józef Putka, Stanisław Korwin-Pawłowski, Stefan Didyk, and Bronisław Czech, as well as Jan Komski, Moses Blum, and Aaron Brün. Cooperation with Targosz was refused by, among others, Ksawery Dunikowski, Mieczysław Kościelniak, and Wincenty Gawron.

Similar institutions existed in other camps (such as Dachau and Buchenwald), although they often assumed a pseudo-anthropological character, involving, for example, the collection of plaster casts or “exhibits” made from human skin.

Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt

An example of “official” camp art is the work of Dina Gottliebová-Babbitt (1923–2009). She was a Czech-American artist of Jewish origin. In January 1942, she and her mother, Jana, were arrested and deported to Theresienstadt, where they spent nearly eighteen months before being imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The artist’s camp experience related to painting differs from the biographies discussed earlier. Dina had demonstrated artistic talent from an early age, later confirmed by her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in what was then Czechoslovak Brno. After arriving in Auschwitz, she painted a mural on the wall of the children’s barrack depicting a scene from the popular Disney fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The mural attracted the attention of Josef Mengele, the SS physician known as the “Angel of Death.” He commissioned her to paint watercolour portraits of Roma people, whom he used in his pseudoscientific experiments. He reportedly insisted that she emphasise physical features that differed from those deemed “Aryan,” which was central to racial theory. Dina worked deliberately slowly, aware that haste could accelerate the extermination of the people she was portraying. Moreover, she tried to help them by sharing her bread.

Her cooperation with Mengele saved her from death in the camp. Furthermore, she managed to ensure the survival of her mother, who had been sent to Auschwitz with her in 1943. Dina painted the Roma portraits in watercolour, using an improvised easel made from a chair. As she herself stated in a recording (Oral History Interview with Dina Babbitt) made available by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, her talent made her “useful,” and thus she and her mother “were placed on the list to be spared”. After the end of the Second World War, she emigrated to the United States, where she married Arthur Babbitt (1907–1992), an animator who worked for the Walt Disney studios and was responsible, among other things, for creating the character Goofy.

The modus operandi of camp artists: how was camp art created?

The fact that artistic production emerged in the camps does not mean that its creators had free access to materials, which were in fact an almost unattainable luxury. Those engaged in artistic work used literally anything available: scraps of paper taken from the margins of forms, packaging, and sometimes even cement sacks. Tools for creation included, among others, pencils, charcoal, improvised ink, and paints. Finished works, if not produced on commission for the Germans, were concealed.

Camp artists demonstrated remarkable ingenuity and skill, both in their artistic practice and in hiding completed works. Artworks were concealed, for example, in false bottoms, in mattresses, within walls, and were sometimes passed clandestinely to others. Not all works, like many of their creators, survived the hell of the camps. The surviving examples represent only a small fragment of a much larger whole. Many were destroyed, burned, or discarded. What remains today is merely a partial legacy. As Barbara Czarnecka observes: “Paradoxically—since one must acknowledge that under such dramatic circumstances every act of creation was an exception—FKL Ravensbrück became a fertile ground for the artistic work of several exceptional women artists. Seen from another perspective, it is precisely in connection with this camp, which ‘received’ numerous transports of educated women, including those trained in the arts, that one should seek the roots of women’s camp art.”.

Associated with this camp is the work of, among others, Éliane Jeannin-Garreau, Nina Jirsíková, Jeannette L’Herminier, Violette Rougier-Lecoq, Maja Berezowska, Maria Hiszpańska, and Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz.

Adam Franciszek Jaźwiecki (alias “Sandor”)

In the history of concentration camps, there exists a distinct category of testimony: drawings created in defiance of the logic of the extermination system. They were not meant to decorate or soften reality, but to preserve it. One of the most important Polish creators of such a visual record was Franciszek Jaźwiecki (1900–1946)—a prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a draftsman, and a witness who, at the risk of his life, recorded what was meant to disappear without a trace. He possessed solid training in drawing and painting, having studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków under masters such as Fryderyk Pautsch and Teodor Axentowicz. This very talent—which under normal circumstances would have offered a path of artistic development—became in the camp reality both a tool of survival and a means of testimony. During the First World War, Franciszek Jaźwiecki served as a legionnaire; during the Second World War, he was active in the underground resistance.

In 1942, he was arrested and imprisoned in Auschwitz. There, Jaźwiecki found himself among prisoners whose artistic skills were exploited by the camp administration. He produced, among other things, technical drawings, charts, and utilitarian works—activities that could mean lighter labour and a greater chance of survival. At the same time, however, the artist made a decision of far greater significance: he began to secretly document camp reality. Some of his works he hid, others he passed on to fellow prisoners or smuggled out in fragments. Only a small number survived—but enough to form today one of the most important collections of visual testimonies of Auschwitz created by an eyewitness.

Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz

Among the artists who documented the Holocaust, many were women. One of them was Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz (1906–1955)—a painter, draughtswoman, and graphic artist. After completing a girls’ secondary school, she trained under Adam Rychtarski at the private Konrad Krzyżanowski School of Painting and Drawing in Warsaw, and subsequently studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Tadeusz Pruszkowski and Władysław Skoczylas. She actively participated in Warsaw’s artistic life and received numerous awards for her work.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the underground resistance. In 1941, she shared the fate of many Poles when she was arrested and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. Already there, she began documenting prison life, creating, among other works, portraits of fellow inmates, including Karolina Olszyńska and Zofia Kwiecińska. She used coloured pencils and drew on wrapping paper. In September of the same year, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, she worked in the so-called Kunstgewerbe, where she was involved, among other tasks, in painting wooden toys. At the same time, she secretly recorded events unfolding in the camp and portrayed victims of Nazi medical experiments, including works such as “Babcia Belawender,” “Maria Grabowska — experimentally operated on in Ravensbrück,” “Hospital Sister from Oświęcim,” and “Ukrainian Women at Work.”.

Interestingly, portraits were also commissioned from her by female guards. Not all of her works survived the war. Some were smuggled out of the camp, while others remained hidden in her bedding. The works from the first group were transported to Warsaw but were destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising; those from the second group survived. When, on 25 April 1945, she was able to leave the camp and travel to Sweden with the assistance of the Swedish Red Cross, she took with her the drawn documentation of the crimes committed in Ravensbrück. After leaving the site of her ordeal, she created the series “Visions from the Camp.”.

Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann

Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann (1917–1980) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the 1930s. During the Second World War, she demonstrated remarkable courage and commitment through her involvement in the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej). A native of Warsaw, she was arrested in 1941. She was initially imprisoned in Radom and later transferred to Pińczów, from where, on 10 April 1942, she was deported to the Ravensbrück–Neubrandenburg camp. As prisoner no. 10219, she created approximately 400 drawings during her imprisonment, becoming— as Renata Osiewała writes — “a chronicler of human suffering and humiliation.”

She survived. After returning to Warsaw, she worked as a graphic artist and painter, designing ration cards and city coats of arms. She also illustrated books and created drawings for poems by, among others, Maria Konopnicka (“I miasto i wioska to jeden nasz świat”), Kazimiera Jeżewska (“O Kacperku Warszawiaku”), and Maria Kownacka (“Kwiatki Małgorzatki”). She never forgot the hell of the camp. For years, she continued to create drawings depicting scenes that reflected the reality she had faced in Ravensbrück.

Many of her works were donated to the local museum as well as to the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej). They have been made available at the IPN Educational Centre Przystanek Historia in Warsaw. As Renata Osiewała recalls, works from the “Camp Cycle,” created both during imprisonment and after liberation, were published in Kazimierz Jaworski’s 1959 book “Hearts Behind the Wire: Memories from Sachsenhausen” and also illustrated the poetry volume “Ravensbrück: Camp Poems”, published in 1961.

Mieczysław Kościelniak

Mieczysław Kościelniak (1912–1993) also made a significant contribution to documenting camp life and conveying the truth about German crimes to the world. He was a painter and illustrator from Kalisz who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in the studio of Józef Mehoffer. His biography also includes a military chapter: between 1933 and 1935, he completed his compulsory military service in an artillery unit in Września, and after the outbreak of the Second World War he took part in the September Campaign of 1939. Fighting in the ranks of the 70th Infantry Regiment, he participated, among other engagements, in the Battle of the Bzura.

After his arrest in 1941, he was imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, he became involved in the underground activities of the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej). He was entrusted with the task of documenting events, which he recorded in drawings. In total, he created more than 300 works, which were later transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. After the end of the Second World War, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Art to help establish the museum in Oświęcim, created on the site of the former death camp. In 1955, his work received official recognition when he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit for his artistic work during his imprisonment in the concentration camps.

Esther Lurie

Esther Lurie (1913–1998) was a painter of Latvian origin, a graduate of theatrical set design and drawing studies in Belgium. While visiting her sister in Kaunas, the war broke out. In 1941, both women were confined to the Kaunas Ghetto. It was there that Lurie began her documentary work. She soon attracted the attention of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), whose envoys commissioned her to officially document life in the ghetto for a secret archive, which afforded her a measure of protection.

Two years later, anticipating the impending liquidation of the ghetto, she buried more than 200 of her works in ceramic jars beneath her sister’s house. This liquidation indeed took place in July 1944. Lurie was then transported to the Stutthof concentration camp and later to its subcamp Ľubica, where she continued to draw, often exchanging portraits for a slice of bread.

The works created by Lurie documenting life in the concentration camp fulfilled their documentary purpose. They were used during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a war criminal convicted of genocide, as evidence of the crimes committed. She donated her drawings to institutions of memory such as Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ House.

Maja Berezowska

Maja Berezowska (1892/3–1978) turned art into an act of resistance and a tool of survival during the Second World War. Born in Baranovichi, in what is today western Belarus, the painter and caricaturist was already a recognised artist before the war, known for her subtle, erotic graphics published in widely read magazines. A turning point in her life came in 1935, when she published a series of caricatures of Adolf Hitler entitled “The Amorous Adventures of Sweet Adolf” in the French magazine “Ici Paris”. The mocking and sexually provocative drawings caused a scandal and led to a court case in Paris, and Hitler himself reportedly never forgot the insult. These drawings are believed to have been the reason she was deliberately located and arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in January 1942.

She was first imprisoned in Pawiak prison and, a few months later, after receiving an official death sentence for “insulting Hitler,” she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. With the help of fellow prisoners, who smuggled drawing materials to her, she recorded everyday camp life. She portrayed women from her cell and the camp, deliberately departing from realistic documentary representation. She gave her subjects rosy cheeks, enhanced their beauty and physical presence, and portrayed them as “radiant with health.” This beautification of fellow prisoners was not intended to erase the truth, but rather constituted an act of psychological resistance and care, meant to give courage both to the women portrayed and to their families.

A second strand of her camp work focused on depicting genre scenes such as roll calls, labour, and preparations for clandestinely organised cultural events, including a camp New Year’s nativity play. Her artistic practice was not merely a form of record-keeping, but an activity that sustained humanity—her own and that of others. Maja Berezowska survived the camp. After the liberation of Ravensbrück in 1945, she travelled to Sweden to recover, and in 1946 she returned to Poland, where she worked as an illustrator and scenographer until the end of her life.

Albin Maria Boniecki

Through his art, Albin Maria Boniecki (1908–1995) also offered comfort and hope to fellow prisoners. A sculptor trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, a soldier of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), and a prisoner of the Majdanek concentration camp (KL Lublin), he transformed his artistic practice into an act of resistance and a means of assistance to others. His most important works were created under the inhumane conditions of the concentration camp.

Taking advantage of the SS authorities’ permission to “beautify” the camp grounds ahead of a visit by the Red Cross, Boniecki created sculptures with double, concealed meanings that conveyed hope and provided tangible help to prisoners. The first was “The Frog”, which, according to Boniecki’s plan, served as a pretext for building a water reservoir. As Irena Siwińska noted: “The ruse succeeded: in Camp Field III the SS agreed to create such a reservoir.” He then created “The Tortoise”, a sculpture referring to the slogan of so-called “minor sabotage,” which read “Work slowly.” The piece was intended to provoke a smile and to remind prisoners of resistance through deliberately slow labour. Next came The Lizard, an allusion to the underground Lizard Union (Związek Jaszczurczy). Worth mentioning as well is the “Column of the Three Eagles”, symbolising freedom, brotherhood, and victory. Work on the column protected exhausted prisoners from death by offering them lighter tasks and a moment of respite.

Imre Holló

Not all documentarians of the Holocaust were trained artists. Imre Holló (1898–1967) was a qualified dentist who ran a dental practice in Sátoraljaújhely. During the First World War, he fought in the ranks of the Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by Russian forces. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was confined in the Budapest Ghetto. From there, in June 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp and subsequently transferred to the AL Riese Dörnhau labour camp in the Owl Mountains, a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The camp was located on the premises of a carpet factory in Dörnhau (today Kolce near Głuszyca).

Holló secretly created a unique series of drawings depicting everyday life in the Dörnhau camp. He documented living conditions, the forced labour of prisoners, roll calls, scenes of guards abusing inmates, beatings, and executions. He made his drawings in black and blue ink on pieces of cardboard taken from advertising brochures. He then hid the drawings in mattress covers, deliberately choosing beds used by prisoners suffering from typhus. As a result, the works were not destroyed.

In the 1950s, he donated 49 drawings to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. His works are also held in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is worth noting that they can also be seen in Poland: in December 2018, a permanent exhibition of Holló’s graphic works created during his imprisonment in the camps was opened at the Walim Tunnels. These are copies of the works donated by the artist to the National Museum in Budapest.

Conclusion

Taking into account the examples of activity by prisoners of concentration camps discussed above, one may conclude that camp art reminds us both of the scale of violence exercised by the modern state—capable of organising death on an industrial level—and of the human capacity to preserve meaning even when everything was meant to be rendered meaningless. Camp art, whether official or created illegally, in all its tragic and complex spectrum, remains one of the most important testimonies of the era of the Holocaust. These objects speak not only of crimes, but above all of an indestructible need for beauty, dignity, and spiritual resistance.

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Editorial note

This article was produced in cooperation between the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and the historical portal Histmag.org as part of a campaign marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on 27 January.

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Not only bodies, but habits. Not only memories, but objects, languages, gestures, and fears carried quietly into ordinary lives. This reflective essay explores the legacy of Holocaust survivor and artist Marianne Grant through the testimony of her daughter, Geraldine Shenkin, tracing how trauma, care, and resistance are transmitted across generations. Based on a conversation between Barbara Walshe and Geraldine Shenkin, it examines survival not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing ethical relationship between the past and those who inherit it—through everyday objects, artistic practice, and the fragile act of remembering itself.

(A reflective essay based on a conversation between Barbara Walshe and Geraldine Shenkin, Marianne Grant’s daughter).

Fragile beginnings

The conversation begins, disarmingly, with everyday logistics: a device that will not sit steady, a camera angle that feels wrong, a phone upgrade that has “changed everything.” Yet this opening is not incidental. It anticipates what will later become the central theme of the testimony itself: how fragile the channels of transmission can be—how easily a story of survival might be distorted, interrupted, or lost. And still, the story goes on.

Geraldine Shenkin lives in Glasgow, within a few miles of where she was born, surrounded by an ordinary architecture of continuity: marriage, two daughters, five grandchildren. She speaks from a life that is recognisably settled. But the conversation’s deeper current is that settlement does not cancel rupture. It contains it.

Geraldine’s childhood, she says, was marked by a persistent sense of difference. The household’s “common language” was German—shared by her parents and her grandmother, carried into Glasgow from elsewhere—and Geraldine “loathed” it as a child. The language itself becomes a sign of displacement, an audible reminder that the home she inhabits is unfamiliar as well as a post-catastrophic refuge. Friends later noticed her parents’ accents; Geraldine did not—“it was just Mum and Dad.” The distinction matters. In the child’s perspective, difference is not exotic; it is intimate. It is ordinary. But the household still recognised that language could render children vulnerable: Geraldine and her siblings were sent to elocution lessons “in order that we pronounce English properly.” Assimilation is presented here not as ideology but as precaution, a quiet technique to encourage safety and strengthen belonging.

The everyday after catastrophe: objects, habit, and embodied inheritance

From language, the conversation shifts to objects—paper, food, newspapers—and it is here that the moral grammar of post-traumatic life becomes visible. Geraldine describes her mother’s inability to discard anything: envelopes written on “every bit,” birthday cards reused as notepads, newspapers stacked and stored for future use. This is not merely frugality. It is a lived theory of dispossession: when everything has once been taken, waste becomes ethically intolerable.

Geraldine still keeps one of her mother’s repurposed cards and shows it to schoolchildren. The pedagogical gesture is telling. She does not instruct by abstraction; she teaches through material culture. The card becomes an artefact of a survival economy, a small object that carries an argument: the past is not only remembered, it is enacted in habits—habits of keeping, saving, reusing, fearing loss.

The same logic governs food. “We could never leave anything on our plate,” Geraldine recalls. Even now she resists discarding anything past a “best before” date, and her explanation expands from the personal to the global—“you think of all the starving people.” Trauma here is not a closed private wound; it becomes a moral lens through which the world is constantly judged. The past shapes not only memory but conscience.

This material ethic is mirrored by an equally embodied inheritance. Geraldine learns as a teenager that her mother had been “in the gas chambers… three times,” and the knowledge does not remain cognitive. It transforms sensation: the smell of gas becomes nauseating, “retching,” incompatible with domestic life. Geraldine cannot tolerate gas cookers; even Jewish ritual is disrupted, because striking a match and lighting Sabbath candles evokes fire and threat. She eventually “overcomes” the reaction—but the point is that knowledge has become physiological y. The trauma of one generation migrates into the sensory system of the next.

The conversation returns to another key inheritance: distrust. Geraldine’s mother hides her handbag inside a plastic carrier bag so it will not attract attention; she cannot trust “anybody.” Geraldine recognises the logic—“a total breakdown of trust”—and then names its psychological consequences in herself: she is “a terrible worrier,” inclined toward pessimism and anticipatory fear. The testimony here does not romanticise legacy. It makes visible the cost of survival when survival becomes a permanent state of vigilance.

And yet Geraldine experience tells her that her mother was also “the friendliest, warmest, intelligent lady,” deeply sociable, loved by neighbours, capable of humour, and astonishingly competent with languages. That duality is essential: the survivor is not only a victim. She is a person—warmth and suspicion, humour and dread, generosity and hoarding, courage and fear—held together uneasily.

If the first half of the conversation is about how the Holocaust persists in the everyday, the second half is about how it is transformed—through art—into an intentional legacy.

Art, recognition, and the ethics of transmission

Marianne Grant’s artistic talent, Geraldine argues, “saved her life through the whole war many times.” In Theresienstadt, Marianne works in agriculture and spends her limited “spare time” making art and crafts with children—small acts of imaginative care under coercion. Later, in Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, she decorates the walls of the children’s block with fairy-tale imagery—Snow White, Bambi, Mickey Mouse, sunshine, mountains. The images are not escapism; they are a counter-environment. Marianne’s remark that there were “no trees” and no birds, only thick yellow mud, underscores what the murals oppose: not simply ugliness, but the deliberate stripping away of life’s ordinary colours. “She wanted to give the children a bit of colour in their lives,” Geraldine says—a sentence that functions as an ethical thesis.

But the conversation does not allow this thesis to become sentimental. Geraldine also describes Marianne being summoned to Josef Mengele and forced to draw markings of children—twins—used in experiments, as well as “Gypsy family trees.” The scene is narrated with minimal embellishment: Mengele “never spoke,” marched in “black shiny boots,” pointed; Marianne understood that “if she made an ink blot, she’d be finished.” Here, the same skill that makes murals possible also makes documentation of atrocity possible. Art becomes both refuge and instrument, both the creation of beauty and the forced rendering of violence. The title “Painting for My Life” is therefore not metaphorical. It is literal.

This is where the conversation’s most striking reflective turn occurs. While writing an epilogue for the book created with Glasgow Museums, Geraldine realises the bitter irony: Mengele’s obsession with twins aimed at racial eradication, and yet Geraldine herself is a twin; her mother gave birth to twins. “He failed,” she says. The claim is not triumphalist—nothing “undoes” what happened—but it locates a thin line of historical resistance in continuity itself. Survival, in this reading, is not only endurance. It is the denial of the perpetrator’s intended finality.

The essayistic depth of Geraldine’s testimony is amplified by two episodes of unexpected encounter—moments when memory returns via others, as if the past insists on meeting the present in public.

At an International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance event in Glasgow in 2024, two Slovak men approach Geraldine with “best wishes” from Dita Kraus, known as “the Librarian of Auschwitz.” Geraldine’s reaction is visceral: she nearly falls. Dita is not an abstract figure; she is a person her parents once knew, now suddenly alive and reaching out. Geraldine travels to meet her, and in three hours learns new dimensions of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives. She discovers that after liberation, Dita lived with Marianne and her mother in Bergen-Belsen; that Dita’s mother died; that Marianne arranged transport for Dita back to Prague and promised to secure a proper burial.

This is an important counter-narrative to popular accounts of survival. It frames the survivor not only as a recipient of rescue but also as an agent of care for others, even amid catastrophe. The ethical question shifts from “How did she live?” to “How did she keep others human—how did she keep herself human—while living?”.

The second episode involves Ella Weissenberger and the hand-painted Hansel and Gretel storybook created in Theresienstadt. Ella does not recognise Marianne’s name at first—not even the nickname “Mosey.” Yet the recognition arrives later through an image. In a café, Geraldine opens a catalogue and turns to the page with the storybook illustrations. Ella grips Geraldine tightly and reveals, from beneath the table, a scroll: a photocopy of one of those drawings, given to her that morning because she recognised it from her own childhood. The discovery is psychologically precise: memory is not only verbal; it is visual, bodily, instantaneous. Geraldine cannot sleep for days.

In these moments, the essay’s guiding question—what survives when everything is taken?—receives a complex answer. What survives is not only a set of facts but a network of recognitions: a drawing remembered, a friendship renewed, a promise fulfilled, an object preserved, a name recovered from ivy and the resilience of human beings.

The return to Prague in 1993 further complicates the notion of survival. At the airport, Marianne cries uncontrollably—an unusual eruption in a woman who described herself as often “numb.” The family visits her father’s grave; they then visit the apartment where she grew up, entering without warning, invited in by a stranger charmed by Marianne’s fluent Czech. Geraldine’s tears here are not only empathy. They are the affective charge of stepping into a space that was once theirs and is now another’s—of confronting the physical normality of stolen continuity. The scene holds an implicit ethical tension: the current resident may not have known the apartment’s history; yet the history is now present in the doorway. The past is not politely distant It is present.

A final axis of the conversation is the shift from private memory to public testimony. Geraldine suggests her mother began speaking openly after Geraldine’s father died in 1986. The explanation is both personal and historical: it was too painful for the couple to speak earlier given their compounded losses; and Britain lacked a public framework for recognition until later developments such as Holocaust Memorial Day. The point is not merely temporal. It is structural: testimony needs an audience capable of hearing it. When the social conditions change, the private story becomes a civic responsibility.

The conversation then anchors this civic responsibility in the present. Geraldine notes rising antisemitism following 7 October and describes it as echoing the incremental restrictions her mother reported—being barred from school, cinema, public life. The past is not invoked as analogy for effect; it is invoked as warning grounded in remembered pattern: exclusion often arrives in stages that appear “small” until they are not. In this sense, Marianne’s legacy is not only commemorative. It is diagnostic.

And then we return—quietly but decisively—to the question of transmission. Geraldine’s grandchildren “know so much.” A fragment of Marianne’s mural practice—Mickey Mouse, Snow White, toadstools—becomes a framed heirloom hanging in a child’s bedroom. A granddaughter, age nine, writes and delivers a Holocaust Memorial Day speech at a non-Jewish school; a rabbi attends to listen. Here, legacy is neither museumification nor myth. It is a living act: a child speaking in her own words, not because she witnessed the past but because she inherits responsibility for it.

If this essay has a closing claim, it is that Marianne Grant’s legacy survives through a triad: material traces, aesthetic resistance, and intergenerational speech. The traces are humble—cards, envelopes, newspapers, a trunk, a roll of paper—yet they encode an entire ethics of post-traumatic life. The resistance is not abstract; it is painted, drawn, and risked under threat. And the speech is not automatic; it is cultivated, chosen, repeated—by a daughter who admits she wishes she had asked more questions, and by grandchildren who speak anyway.

In the end, “what survives” is not simply the survivor. It is the relationship between the survivor’s inner world and the world that comes after: a relationship built from objects that refuse disposal, from art that refuses dehumanisation, and from voices that refuse silence.

***

Editorial note

This essay was conducted as part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026 campaign: The Art of Remembrance, organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS).

Not only life itself, but the fragile, stubborn forms through which life insists on meaning: language shaped by caution, objects guarded against loss, art created under threat, and memory carried forward by those born after catastrophe. In this conversation, Geraldine Shenkin reflects on her mother Marianne Grant’s survival of the Holocaust—not as a closed chapter of history, but as a living legacy embedded in everyday habits, sensory memory, artistic practice, and ethical responsibility. Speaking with Barbara Walshe, she traces how trauma is transmitted quietly across generations, how art becomes both refuge and evidence, and how remembrance survives not through abstraction, but through intimate acts of care, recognition, and speech.

Barbara Walshe: Geraldine, thank you for speaking with us. I’d like to begin with you, not with history. How are you and where is “home” for you?.

Geraldine: Home is Glasgow. I was born here, and I’ve never moved far—only about two miles from where I was born. I’m married, and I have two daughters, both married with children. One lives in London and one lives near me in Glasgow. I have five grandchildren—three boys and two girls. I feel very blessed.

Barbara: You’ve often said you grew up “a little bit different.” What did that difference feel like inside the house?

Geraldine: The common language between my parents and my grandmother was German. German was spoken in the house—and as a child, I loathed it. My mum later suggested I study German when I was sixteen so she could help me, and I did. But growing up, it made me feel different. Friends later said my parents had accents; to me, they were just Mum and Dad. Still, there were phrases said “the wrong way round,” and we were sent to elocution lessons early to make sure we pronounced English properly.

Barbara: The “difference” wasn’t only language, though. It sounds like the war lived in the everyday—quietly, but constantly.

Geraldine: Yes. My mother couldn’t throw anything out. Envelopes, letters—she’d write on every bit of paper, inside, outside, back of cards… Everything became a list, a note, something reused. I still have a birthday card with numbers written on it, and I show it to children in schools—because when you’ve had everything taken from you, nothing feels disposable. Nothing.

Barbara: So the house itself held a kind of memory—through objects.

Geraldine: Absolutely. Food too—nothing could be wasted. If we left food, she’d keep it for later, the next day. And she kept newspapers—there was a kitchen shelf packed underneath with papers piled high. Everything could be reused: lighting the fire, stuffing shoes, protecting bulbs in the garden. After she died in 2007, it took my siblings and me a year to clear the house.

Barbara: A year. That sounds like grief, but also archaeology—like you were excavating a life.

Geraldine: That’s exactly it. And in the loft we found her treasures. There was a trunk we were never allowed to open as children. That trunk is now on display in Glasgow at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It came with her from Sweden after the war. Some paintings and drawings were kept hidden.

Barbara: Can I ask something sensitive? When did you truly begin to understand what your mother had been through?

Geraldine: It came out slowly. She didn’t want to burden us—she didn’t want to scare us. There were moments. I remember eating an egg once, and she told me how she had been given an egg by an SS soldier in Auschwitz after doing something—painting for him—and how she shared that egg among several people. She described it like diamonds. Stories like that appeared, but we didn’t ask too many questions.

Barbara: You said something striking: that as children you somehow knew not to ask.

Geraldine: Yes. I’ve spoken to other children of survivors and they say the same: there was a boundary. And I still wonder—why didn’t I ask? I’m the nosiest person in the world. But you just… didn’t.

Barbara: And yet some knowledge arrived anyway—sometimes with a physical cost. You spoke about gas.

Geraldine: I learned in my early teens that my mum had been in the gas chambers in Auschwitz three times. That haunted me. For years, I couldn’t go near a gas cooker. The smell of gas made me retch. I never had a gas cooker. Even food cooked on gas bothered me. And as a Jewish woman, you light Sabbath candles on Friday night—but I couldn’t strike a match at first. Fire… it was very hard. I did overcome it over time, but it affected me deeply.

Barbara: That’s an important point: the Holocaust isn’t only “history.” It becomes a bodily inheritance.

Geraldine: Yes. And not just that. My mum was so nervous, so unable to trust. She’d hide her handbag inside a plastic carrier bag so nobody would steal it. That total breakdown of trust… it shapes you. I’m a worrier. My daughters say I’m pessimistic—always thinking what could go wrong. I try not to be, but it’s there.

Barbara: And yet you also describe her as warm, friendly, intelligent—someone people loved. How do those two truths live together?

Geraldine: She was both. She was the friendliest, warmest, cleverest woman—ahead of her time. Her language skills were incredible. She could speak to anybody. Even in hospital, dying of cancer, in pain—she still had that sharp clarity. She told me, “Don’t be so daft. I’ll be dead by tomorrow.” And she was. She was right to the end.

Barbara: Let’s talk about what sustained her—and what she carried forward. Her art seems central. You’ve said it saved her life.

Geraldine: It did. Her talent—art and languages—saved her many times. She was first taken from Prague to Theresienstadt in 1942, and she spent about twenty months there. She worked in agriculture there and, in her spare time, did art and crafts with the children—trying to bring them something.

Barbara: This idea of bringing “something”—colour, perhaps—into a world built to erase colour.

Geraldine: Exactly. She always said she wanted to give children “a bit of colour in their lives.” Later, in Auschwitz, she decorated the children’s block. She painted Snow White, Bambi, Mickey Mouse, sunshine, mountains—lovely things. She said Auschwitz then wasn’t like it is now; there wasn’t a tree, no birds—just thick yellow mud. The murals were colour in a place without colour.

Barbara: You mentioned a friend who helped preserve her drawings—someone who literally carried her art forward.

Geraldine: Yes—Peter Urban. She gave him drawings and paintings to keep safely. That’s how they survived. And there’s a story from Theresienstadt: a starving little girl threw her shoe into an apple tree to get an apple down, the apple fell but the shoe got stuck. It was discovered. My mum used her language and charm and bravery to spare that girl a beating. The girl later grew up—Eva Urbanist—and she told me the story years ago, laughing.

Barbara: So art and language—two tools—become two ways of saving: saving objects, saving people, saving a sense of humanity.

Geraldine: Yes.

Barbara: You also spoke about your mother’s relationship to her own mother—your grandmother—especially around deportation.

Geraldine: In Theresienstadt my grandmother was put on the cattle wagon “to the East.” My mum managed to get her off the train three times—but then couldn’t get her off again. She couldn’t. The wagons stood there all day; they were filling them. Eventually my mum and grandmother were reunited later in Auschwitz, but it was horrific.

Barbara: I want to bring in another part of the story: your father. Often Holocaust narratives flatten families into a single “survivor story,” but yours is two histories meeting.

Geraldine: My father came to the UK at the end of 1938 or early 1939, from Königsberg, East Prussia. His family paid for him to come; someone had to sponsor him. He was a teenager. He never saw his parents or brother again. They were murdered. For years my parents thought they died in 1941, but I’ve only discovered in recent months they were rounded up in November 1943 in Berlin, among a group of just under 5,000.

Barbara: That late discovery—how does it land emotionally, decades later?

Geraldine: It shakes you. You think you know, and then you learn there were more years, more time, more waiting. The grief changes shape.

Barbara: Let’s move to a moment you described as profoundly emotional: returning to Prague with your mother in 1993. What happened when she stepped back into that city?

Geraldine: She became overwhelmed. She didn’t cry often, but at the airport she couldn’t hold back tears. We visited her father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery—enormous, with mausoleums. It took a long time to find the grave because ivy had grown over the stone. When we pulled it off, the writing was preserved.

Barbara: The ivy preserved the name. That’s such an image—nature covering, and also protecting.

Geraldine: Yes. Then we went to the apartment block where she grew up—beautiful flats in a good part of Prague near a park. My grandfather worked for the Bohemian Union Bank; the flats were for bank employees. My mum rang the bell, charmed the woman in Czech, and suddenly we were invited in.

Barbara: What did it feel like to walk into a home that was yours—and not yours?

Geraldine: It was emotional. I cried. My grandmother had described details—parquet floors, a gas heater on the wall—and it was exactly as she’d said. The woman who lived there was an architect and lived there with her son. We arrived without warning. I can’t imagine what she felt—a Jewish family turning up at the door of an apartment that had been taken. She likely felt shock, maybe awkwardness, maybe guilt—even if she hadn’t known the history.

Barbara: This raises a difficult question: what is “return” after dispossession? Is it closure, confrontation, or something else?

Geraldine: It’s all of it. It’s draining. It’s hard. But it mattered to my mother—to show us.

Barbara: I want to ask about how memory keeps “finding” you—sometimes through strangers. You spoke about a remarkable encounter at an IHRA event in Glasgow in 2024.

Geraldine: Yes. It was a conference with delegates from all over the world. I spoke at an event at Kelvingrove, after the Scottish First Minister. Two Slovak gentlemen came to me and said they had best wishes for me from a woman called Dita Kraus—who is known as the “Librarian of Auschwitz.”

Barbara: What did it mean to hear that name, out of nowhere?

Geraldine: I almost fell flat on the floor. My parents had been friends with Dita and her husband after the war. I didn’t even know she was still alive. She was turning 95 two weeks later. They put me in touch with her. We spoke on the phone, emailed—her English was excellent because she’d been an English teacher in Israel. She sent photographs of my mum and her together from earlier years.

Barbara: And you went to see her.

Geraldine: Yes. In March, I decided I had to go. I went with my niece. At first she didn’t feel well enough, but the next day I spent three hours with her. It was incredibly emotional. That’s where I learned so much about my mother and grandmother.

Barbara: What did she tell you that changed your understanding?

Geraldine: I learned that after liberation, Dita lived with my mum and grandmother in Bergen-Belsen. They arrived there ten days before liberation in April 1945. Dita was travelling in the same group with her mother, and after liberation they were put together. Dita’s mother was very ill. My mum arranged for her to go to hospital, but she died. My mum bought Dita a transport to Prague and promised she’d make sure her mother was buried properly—she did. They stayed lifelong friends.

Barbara: That’s extraordinary. It’s also a form of “legacy” we don’t always speak about: survival as responsibility for others.

Geraldine: Yes. My mum did that kind of thing. She had that strength.

Barbara: Another “memory finding you” moment was with Ella Weissenberger—connected to the Hansel and Gretel storybook. Tell me that story.

Geraldine: My mum created a hand-painted Hansel and Gretel storybook in Theresienstadt. For the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Ella Weissenberger came to Glasgow to speak. The day before, I met her at the Scottish Parliament. She didn’t recognise my mother’s name. I even mentioned my mum’s nickname, “Mausi”—because she was so skinny as a child, like a little mouse. Still no.

Barbara: And then?

Geraldine: The next day I went early to a museum café for a coffee. Ella walked in and sat next to me—unexpectedly. I had brought a catalogue book of my mum’s works—don’t ask me why, I just had a feeling. I opened it, turned pages, and when we reached the page showing four illustrations from the Hansel and Gretel storybook, her hand dug into me—she gripped me tightly. Under the table she pulled out a scroll: a photocopy of one of the drawings. She had been given it that morning by the museum because she recognised it—she had seen it before as a child. My mum had been creating that with her.

Barbara: That is… almost unbearable in its intimacy. The past reaches out through a child’s memory and touches you physically.

Geraldine: I couldn’t sleep for days.

Barbara: Geraldine, I want to ask about something ethically complicated. Your mother created beauty—murals for children—inside a place designed for murder. How do you hold that paradox?

Geraldine: She said the children were there only for a short time—three to six months—before they were taken to be gassed. She wanted to give them colour, something human. She got permission. And at the same time, she was also summoned to Mengele. She had to draw markings of children—twins—he had experimented on, and also “Gypsy family trees.” She said he never spoke, just marched in black shiny boots and pointed. She knew if she made an ink blot, she would be finished.

Barbara: And that connects to the book title—“Painting for My Life”.

Geraldine: Yes. And when I was writing the epilogue for the book with the Glasgow Museums curators, something hit me: Mengele was trying to wipe out Jews, doing experiments on twins… and I am a twin. My mother gave birth to twins. He failed. It’s ironical. It’s justice of a kind.

Barbara: When did your mother begin to speak publicly about the Holocaust? You suggest that happened after your father died. Why then?

Geraldine: My father died in December 1986, on the 23rd—his burial was on Christmas Eve. He was so loved that shops closed; it was an enormous funeral, with a police escort. About a year or two later, my mother began to speak publicly—first at a fundraising event. I think it was too painful for both my parents before that. My father had lost everyone. My mother lost 22 relatives. They carried too much grief. And also, in Britain, there wasn’t really public recognition for a long time. Holocaust Memorial Day changed that—the Britian became more aware, more willing to listen.

Barbara: Listening isn’t only a ritual, though—it’s a responsibility. You brought up antisemitism rising after 7 October, and how it echoes what your mother described from the early years of Nazi restrictions. How does that affect you now?

Geraldine: I’m Jewish first, and Scottish. I’ve had a protected life here, and I feel privileged. But I worry about the future. When antisemitism rises, it feels like history’s shadow lengthening again. I spoke in Scottish Parliament about how my mum told me Jews were banned from cinema, school—how life becomes restricted step by step.

Barbara: And yet you also carry your mother’s moral lesson—her insistence on the equal worth of people.

Geraldine: Yes. She taught that we are all human beings—flesh and blood—whatever colour, whatever background. She integrated with everyone. Neighbours weren’t all Jewish; we welcomed them. She believed people should love each other.

Barbara: Geraldine, let’s end where we began: what survives when everything is taken? I want to ask about your grandchildren. What do they know—what do they carry?

Geraldine: They know a lot. They talk about Mausi. They’re proud of her. I once found a roll of paper when clearing the house—part of the frieze she practised for Yad Vashem, remembering the colours. It had Mickey Mouse, Snow White, toadstools—you could see pencil marks behind the paint. I framed it and gave it to my eldest granddaughter when she was about six. It hangs in her bedroom. And my younger granddaughter—Freya, she’s ten now—spoke at her school last year for Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s not a Jewish school. The rabbi came to listen. She wrote and delivered a speech herself about her great-grandmother. She was nine. These children were born long after my mum died—and yet it’s still going on.

Barbara: That is legacy in the deepest sense—not nostalgia, not biography, but a living transmission. If you could say one thing your mother would want future generations to understand, what would it be?

Geraldine: That it must be taught—for decades ahead. She wanted everyone to learn what happened. And I’m proud—proud of her, proud that her story continues through the art, through the museum, through the book, and through the children.

Barbara: And what do you wish for yourself, inside this legacy?

Geraldine: I wish I had asked more questions when I was younger. But I’m grateful we made the book—because it holds the whole story. And I’m grateful that people want to listen, and that her story can reach further.

Barbara: Geraldine, thank you. Your mother’s art survived the camps—and you’ve helped it survive time. That is a different kind of courage.

Geraldine: Thank you. I’m trying. I’m trying to keep her alive.

***

Editorial note

This interview was conducted as part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026 campaign: The Art of Remembrance, organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS).

Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, Marianne Grant drew for children. Not because the camp allowed innocence, but because the children still needed it — and because drawing could carve out a few minutes in which fear did not occupy the entire room. A line, a colour, a familiar figure on a wall: small gestures against a system built to erase personhood.

Years later, Grant would describe the purpose of these gestures with disarming simplicity: her art saved her life. It saved it in ways both practical and cruelly paradoxical — as a means of exchange, as a shield, and at times as a skill exploited by perpetrators. What began as survival, however, became something else: a form of witness created not after the Holocaust, but within it. Her drawings do not recall the camp from a distance; they carry its presence.

Before survival: becoming an artist

Art did not enter Marianne Grant’s life as an accident of circumstance. Long before it became a tool of survival, it was a language she had learned to speak with discipline and intent.

Born in Prague in 1921 as Mariana Hermannová, Marianne grew up in a cultivated, middle-class Jewish family for whom education and cultural life were self-evident values. Her father, Rudolf Hermann, encouraged intellectual curiosity; her mother, Anna, herself a skilled craftswoman, embroidered, drew, and painted. From an early age, Marianne was surrounded by images, textures, and forms — not as luxury, but as part of everyday life. Drawing was not an escape; it was practice.

Her artistic education was formal and demanding. In 1937, she was accepted into the renowned Rotter Studio in Prague, led by Vilém Rotter — a centre of modern graphic design with a strong emphasis on technical precision, observation, and professional discipline. There, Marianne studied graphics, illustration, and design, training her eye and hand long before she could imagine how decisive this training would become. She learned both how to draw, and how to work: methodically, efficiently, and with limited means.

This distinction matters. Grant did not survive because she possessed some ineffable, miraculous “talent”. She survived because she had a skill — a practised craft — that could be recognised, exchanged, and exploited. Her drawings were not spontaneous expressions of emotion; they were the result of years of study, repetition, and refinement. In the camps, this difference would prove crucial.

When German-Nazi racial laws closed off educational and professional paths to Jewish citizens, Marianne’s training was abruptly interrupted. Her plans to study art formally were shattered by the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Yet even as restrictions tightened, she continued to draw, to teach, and to refine her skills — quietly, persistently, without knowing that these acts of continuity would later form the basis of her survival. Art, in other words, preceded catastrophe. It was not born from trauma; it was carried into it.

Art as protection

In the camps, survival depended not only on physical strength or chance, but on visibility. To be seen in the right way, by the right people, at the right moment could mean the difference between life and death. Marianne Grant learned this quickly — and learned how art could make her visible.

After being deported to Theresienstadt in April 1942, Marianne was assigned to work in agriculture. This was not an arbitrary decision. She had actively sought this placement, having heard that agricultural labour offered better access to food — both for consumption and for barter. Hunger governed every aspect of camp life, and even marginal advantages mattered. Working in the youth garden placed Marianne in a slightly less exposed position within the camp’s rigid hierarchy, while also bringing her into daily contact with adolescent girls under her supervision.

Here, art quietly re-entered her life. Even in the ghetto, Marianne continued to draw, teach, and observe. She sketched in moments stolen from labour, using whatever materials she could acquire or improvise. Drawing was not an act of resistance in any overt sense; it was something more pragmatic. It created usefulness. It created a role.

In Theresienstadt, usefulness meant protection. Marianne became a leader within the youth garden, responsible for girls aged twelve to seventeen. This position afforded her limited authority and, crucially, access to slightly better food rations. Art functioned as a form of currency — not in the romanticised sense of beauty, but in its capacity to be exchanged for survival essentials. A drawing could secure vegetables, bread, or favours that might later be repaid in kind.

Yet art also provided something less tangible but equally vital: recognition. In a system designed to reduce individuals to numbers and replaceable bodies, Marianne’s drawings marked her as someone with a skill, a function, a name attached to an ability. This recognition did not make her safe — no one was safe — but it made her less invisible.

This visibility followed her to Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration Camp, where she was deported in December 1943 together with her mother. Upon arrival, Marianne was assigned to work in the children’s block, caring for children who had been separated from their parents. Once again, art became a means of protection, though now under far more brutal conditions.

Using scraps of paper, charcoal, and improvised tools, Marianne drew with the children, taught them to draw, and painted murals on the walls of the block. These were not grand compositions, but simple, recognisable images: animals, trees, landscapes, figures from fairy tales. Mickey Mouse and Bambi appeared alongside forests and imagined homes. In a space defined by deprivation, these images opened a narrow window onto another world.

Protection here was not only physical. It was psychological, relational, and fleeting. Drawing created moments in which the children were no longer merely inmates, no longer defined solely by fear and separation. For Marianne herself, caring for the children and drawing with them established a fragile sense of purpose. It anchored her to others at a time when isolation could be fatal. Art did not shield her from violence. It did not stop selections, hunger, or disease. But it made her necessary — and in Auschwitz, necessity could delay death.

This protection came at a cost. Marianne’s talent did not go unnoticed by the camp authorities. Her drawings attracted the attention of an SS officer, who commissioned her to create hand-painted storybooks for his children and later demanded a portrait as a gift for his wife. When Marianne fell ill with pleurisy, this same officer intervened, bringing her bread and butter when no medicine was available. His actions likely saved her life. Yet this intervention also exposed her. Through these acts, Marianne’s art brought her to the attention of Josef Mengele. What had protected her would soon be used against others — and against her own sense of moral agency.

Art as relation: children

In the children’s block of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drawing was not a distraction from reality. It was a way of inhabiting it differently — if only for minutes at a time.

Marianne Grant was assigned to work with children who had been torn from their parents upon arrival in the camp. Many of them were too young to understand where they were or why they had been separated; others understood far too well. The children’s block was not a place of safety, but it was distinct from the rest of the camp in one crucial respect: it was a space where a fragile form of care still existed.

Here, Marianne’s art took on a relational dimension. She did not draw for herself alone, nor even primarily for survival. She drew with and for the children, responding to their need for familiarity, reassurance, and structure. Using whatever materials she could find — scraps of paper, charcoal, makeshift pigments — she encouraged them to draw, to recognise shapes, and to imagine scenes beyond the barbed wire.

The images she painted on the walls of the block were deliberately chosen. Disney characters, animals, trees, and landscapes appeared not because they denied the surrounding horror, but because they countered it. These figures were not abstract symbols of hope; they were recognisable elements of a shared childhood culture. Mickey Mouse and Bambi were not metaphors — they were reminders of a world in which children were allowed to be children.

For brief moments, drawing created continuity. It restored a sense of before and after in a place designed to erase both. In this sense, art functioned as a form of resistance that did not announce itself as such. It resisted the logic of total dehumanisation by insisting, quietly and persistently, on relationship.

Marianne was acutely aware of the limits of this protection. She did not believe that drawing could shield the children from deportation or death. But she understood that it could shape how those moments were lived. Her drawings accompanied daily routines in the block — roll calls, meals, waiting. They did not remove fear, but they gave it form, and sometimes distance.

Importantly, these acts of drawing were also acts of mutual recognition. The children were not passive recipients of comfort; they participated, observed, imitated, laughed, and concentrated. Art established a temporary community, grounded not only in shared suffering, but in shared attention.

This relational aspect of Marianne’s art complicates later interpretations that frame camp art solely as documentation or protest. In the children’s block, art was neither. It was care. It was presence. It was the deliberate creation of a space in which the camp’s total claim over the individual was momentarily suspended. Yet even here, art could not escape the structures of power that governed the camp. The very visibility that allowed Marianne to draw with the children also exposed her to scrutiny. The walls she painted were observed not only by the children, but by guards. The space of care existed only insofar as it was tolerated. This tolerance would soon collapse into coercion.

Art under coercion

The same skill that allowed Marianne Grant to draw with children and create moments of fragile care would soon be stripped of its relational meaning and placed at the service of violence. In Auschwitz, art did not remain neutral for long. After her illness and the intervention of an SS officer who provided her with food, Marianne’s work came to the attention of Josef Mengele. From that moment on, drawing was no longer something she could choose to do. It became an order.

Mengele assigned her to produce detailed drawings documenting the bodies of prisoners subjected to his medical experiments — particularly twins and people with dwarfism. She was instructed to draw family trees, physical markings, and anatomical features. Precision was demanded. Emotion was irrelevant. The same disciplined hand trained years earlier in the Rotter Studio was now required to serve a system of pseudo-scientific cruelty.

This was not art as survival through exchange. It was art under coercion — extracted, commanded, instrumentalised. Marianne did not control what she drew, for whom, or to what end. Her drawings were taken from her immediately. She did not know how they would be used, nor whether they would survive. What she knew was that refusal was impossible.

Here, the moral tension embedded in camp art becomes unavoidable. Marianne’s drawing saved her life, but it did so by entangling her in a system that harmed others. There is no clean ethical resolution to this fact. To frame her work for Mengele as collaboration would be a profound misreading; to frame it as resistance would be equally misleading. It was neither. It was coerced labour under threat of death.

What distinguishes Marianne’s experience is not moral purity, but moral clarity. She never romanticised this period. She did not retrospectively justify it, nor did she collapse under guilt. She described it as what it was: something she was forced to do in order to stay alive. Survival did not erase the violence of the act; it coexisted with it.

Even in this context, traces of her earlier relational work remained. Mengele eventually permitted her to paint murals in the children’s block — an extraordinary concession that again reveals the contradictions of the camp system. Art could be tolerated, even encouraged, when it served the regime’s purposes or reduced unrest. That these same murals might also sustain the humanity of prisoners was incidental.

Marianne’s experience under coercion exposes the limits of any attempt to categorise camp art neatly as either resistance or documentation. In Auschwitz, art was never free. It existed within a web of power, threat, and survival strategies. The question is not whether art was compromised — it was — but whether compromise erased its meaning. For Marianne Grant, it did not. But it changed it irrevocably.

Art as witness

Marianne Grant did not set out to document the Holocaust. She did not draw with the intention of creating evidence for the future. And yet, this is precisely what her work became.

What distinguishes Grant’s drawings from many post-war artistic responses to the Holocaust is not style, but time. Her drawings were not acts of remembrance; they were acts of presence. They were created inside the camps, under their rules, rhythms, and terrors. They do not reconstruct memory — they record experience as it unfolded.

This immediacy gives her work the character of first-hand testimony. Unlike artists who returned to camp imagery years later, Marianne drew what she saw when she saw it, using limited materials and without the possibility of revision. The lines are spare, sometimes hesitant, sometimes abrupt. There is no compositional flourish, no symbolic framing. Bodies appear thin, postures slumped, faces simplified almost to anonymity. What emerges is not expressionism, but observation. This lack of aesthetic distance is precisely where the power of her drawings lies. They do not ask to be admired. They do not dramatize suffering. They insist on attention.

Art historian Jo Meacock has described Grant’s work as occupying a space between survival and witness — not fully conscious of its future function, yet unmistakably bearing it. Marianne herself resisted the idea that she had been “documenting” the camps. She did not see herself as an artist-reporter. Drawing, she maintained, was simply what she did to stay alive.

And yet, intent is not the only measure of testimony. What matters equally is position. Grant’s drawings were produced inside the system of persecution, not from its aftermath. They were not shaped by hindsight or narrative coherence. They record fragments: a queue, a body, a posture, a moment of waiting. In their accumulation, these fragments refuse abstraction.

In this sense, her art challenges the very category of “camp art”. It is neither illustration nor protest, neither private diary nor public accusation. It is closer to a visual statement made under duress — an involuntary archive of the everyday mechanics of dehumanisation.

Crucially, Grant’s drawings do not attempt to explain the camps. They show them. This distinction matters. Explanation risks closure; showing resists it. The drawings leave space for the viewer’s discomfort, refusing to guide interpretation or provide moral resolution. This quality becomes particularly striking when contrasted with the popular expectation that Holocaust art must be sombre, dark, and overtly tragic. Grant’s work does not conform to this expectation — and that refusal is itself significant.

Colour, innocence, refusal of despair

One of the most striking aspects of Marianne Grant’s camp drawings is their use of colour. In a visual culture that has come to associate the Holocaust almost exclusively with greys, blacks, and the stripped-down aesthetics of despair, her work unsettles expectation.

Colour, in Grant’s drawings, is not accidental. Nor is it decorative. It appears where it seems least appropriate — in the children’s block, on the walls of barracks, in scenes of imagined nature. Flowers bloom, animals move, familiar cartoon figures smile. At first glance, these images may appear incongruous, even naïve. Look closer, and their function becomes clear. Colour was not a denial of reality. It was a refusal to allow reality to define the entirety of human experience.

Grant did not use colour to soften the camps or make them bearable in retrospect. She used it in the moment, as a deliberate counterweight to a system designed to drain life of meaning. In spaces where everything was regulated, rationed, and stripped of individuality, colour reintroduced choice. It asserted that not everything could be dictated by the logic of the camp.

The presence of Disney characters and fairy-tale imagery has often puzzled later viewers. How, one might ask, could such motifs coexist with mass murder? But this question misunderstands their purpose. These images were not attempts to escape the camp through fantasy. They were anchors to a shared cultural memory of childhood — a memory that the camp sought to erase.

For the children who lived in the block, these figures were recognisable, comforting, and relational. They did not transport the children elsewhere; they reminded them of who they were before arrival. In doing so, the drawings resisted the camp’s central aim: to transform people into interchangeable, dehumanised units. Grant herself was acutely aware of the fragility of this resistance. She did not believe that colour or drawing could undo terror. What they could do, however, was preserve a narrow space of inner life — a space not fully accessible to violence.

This insistence on inner life marks a crucial ethical stance. Grant did not aestheticise suffering. She did not draw scenes of brutality for their own sake. Instead, she chose to depict what the system tried hardest to annihilate: ordinary gestures, moments of care, traces of imagination. In doing so, she rejected the idea that horror alone should define representation.

Her use of colour also complicates later expectations placed on Holocaust testimony. Viewers often demand that such testimony conform to a specific emotional register — solemn, sombre, unrelievedly dark. Grant’s work refuses this demand. It insists that despair was not the only emotional reality of the camps, and that acknowledging moments of light does not diminish suffering. On the contrary, it reveals what was at stake.

Silence after survival

Survival did not lead immediately to testimony. For Marianne Grant, it led first to silence. After liberation, she and her mother were evacuated to Sweden to recover from illness and exhaustion. There, Marianne slowly returned to physical health, learned to live without constant fear, and began to imagine a future not defined by the camp. Soon after, she moved to Scotland, married, raised a family, and resumed her artistic education at the Glasgow School of Art. From the outside, her life followed a trajectory of rebuilding and stability.

Her drawings, however, did not follow her into public life. For decades, the works she had created during the war remained stored in a trunk in her home. She did not exhibit them. She did not speak publicly about her experiences. Even her children grew up knowing little about what she had endured. This silence was not imposed; it was chosen.

Grant never described this period as repression or denial. Rather, it was a way of living forward. She did not see herself as a witness-in-waiting, nor did she feel an obligation to narrate her past for others. The drawings had served their purpose once already. They had helped her survive. She did not yet need them to speak.

This long silence complicates common assumptions about Holocaust testimony. We often imagine survivors as either compelled to speak immediately or traumatically unable to do so. Grant’s experience suggests a third possibility: testimony postponed, not out of fear, but out of a desire for ordinary life. Silence, in this sense, was not absence. It was containment.

The drawings waited. They existed, intact but dormant, carrying meanings that had not yet been activated. Their potential as testimony depended not only on the act of creation, but on the moment of reception. That moment would come much later, when Grant herself felt ready to relinquish private ownership of her past. This delay is ethically significant. It reminds us that testimony is not an automatic consequence of survival. It is a decision — one shaped by time, context, and the changing demands of memory.

When art returned to the world

When Marianne Grant finally decided to bring her drawings out of the trunk and into the public sphere, it was not because she felt compelled by history to do so. It was because the conditions around memory had changed — and because she herself had changed with them.

The turning point came after the death of her husband. For the first time, Grant found herself alone with a body of work that no longer belonged solely to her private life. The drawings, once tools of survival and then objects of silence, began to demand a different kind of presence. They were no longer only reminders of what she had lived through; they had become documents of a world that was receding into history.

Grant’s decision to exhibit her work was deliberate and measured. She did not seek recognition as an artist in the conventional sense, nor did she frame her drawings as masterpieces. Instead, she presented them as what they were: visual records created under conditions that defied comprehension. In 1997, she was invited to recreate her mural from the children’s block of Auschwitz for Yad Vashem’s exhibition “No Child’s Play”. The act of recreation was itself significant. It was not an attempt to reproduce trauma, but to translate memory into a form that could be shared responsibly.

Exhibitions followed in Scotland, most notably at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. For many viewers, these drawings were their first encounter with camp art created not after the war, but within it — and created by a woman who had chosen, for decades, not to speak. The impact was profound precisely because the works resisted spectacle. They did not overwhelm; they invited sustained attention.

As Grant began to speak publicly, she did so without bitterness or accusation. She did not frame her story as a moral indictment, nor did she claim authority through suffering alone. Instead, she spoke with restraint, clarity, and an unwavering commitment to human dignity. Her testimony was not about vengeance, but about responsibility.

Education became a central aspect of this renewed public role. Grant worked closely with schools, educators, and museums, engaging directly with young people. She understood that as the generation of survivors diminished, the burden of memory would shift. Her drawings were not meant to shock students into awareness; they were meant to teach them how to look, how to ask questions, and how to recognise the early signs of dehumanisation.

In this phase of her life, art assumed yet another function. It was no longer protection, relation, or survival. It became mediation — a bridge between lived experience and historical understanding. Grant did not insist on how her work should be interpreted. She trusted viewers to meet it with seriousness. What returned to the world was not only a body of drawings, but a mode of witnessing grounded in humility. Grant did not speak because she had to. She spoke because she chose to — and because she recognised that silence, once protective, could no longer carry the weight of the future.

Marianne’s legacy: responsibility after witnesses

Marianne Grant never claimed ownership over Holocaust memory. She resisted the idea that her experience granted her moral authority over others. Yet in the final decades of her life, she became acutely aware that memory does not survive on its own — and that when witnesses disappear, responsibility does not vanish with them. It shifts.

Grant’s legacy is not defined solely by what she endured or what she drew, but by how she understood the future of remembrance. She observed with concern the growing distance between historical events and contemporary consciousness, especially among younger generations for whom the Holocaust risked becoming an abstract chapter rather than a human catastrophe. Denial, distortion, and trivialisation were not theoretical dangers; they were already present.

In this context, her drawings assumed renewed urgency. They did not compete with photographs or archival documents. Instead, they offered something different: a human-scale entry point into history. Created without the intention of educating future audiences, they nevertheless proved uniquely suited to that task. Their simplicity resisted sensationalism. Their restraint demanded attention. They asked viewers not only to learn, but to reckon.

Grant believed deeply in education — not as the transmission of facts alone, but as the cultivation of ethical awareness. She worked with schools and educational initiatives that emphasised critical thinking, empathy, and historical responsibility. Her participation in programmes such as Vision Schools Scotland reflected her conviction that Holocaust education must extend beyond commemoration into the present, addressing prejudice, exclusion, and the early warning signs of dehumanisation.

Crucially, Grant did not frame memory as inheritance alone. She spoke instead of stewardship. Memory, in her view, was not something received passively from the past, but something actively maintained — or lost — through everyday choices. This belief shaped how her family engaged with her work. Her children and grandchildren did not become custodians of a fixed narrative, but guardians of a fragile legacy that required care, interpretation, and renewal.

This understanding resonates powerfully today, as the last survivors pass away. The absence of living witnesses does not absolve societies of responsibility; it intensifies it. Without direct testimony, remembrance must rely on materials, narratives, and ethical commitments shaped by those who remain.

Marianne Grant’s art does not offer answers to this challenge. It offers a framework. It shows how art can function without grandiosity — how it can preserve dignity without simplifying suffering, and how it can bear witness without claiming closure. Her drawings endure not because they are exceptional artworks in a conventional sense, but because they remain honest to the conditions under which they were created. They do not ask to be admired. They ask to be read.

In the end, Marianne Grant did not paint to be remembered. She painted to survive. That her art now teaches others how to remember is not a coincidence, nor a triumph. It is a responsibility — one that begins where witnesses end.

***

Editorial note

This article is based on the publication “Painting for My Life: The Holocaust Artworks of Marianne Grant” (2021), by Dr Joanna Meacock, Peter Tuka, Deborah Haase, and contributing authors. The book is one of the most comprehensive studies of Marianne Grant’s life and work, presenting her art as a first-hand visual testimony of the Holocaust and offering crucial insight into the role of artistic practice under conditions of extreme violence.

On 20 January 1942, several high-ranking dignitaries of the Third Reich met in a villa on Lake Wannsee. During the preceding weeks, the political situation in which the Nazi state found itself had clearly changed. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. At the same time, the lack of success in the Battle of Moscow meant that the vision of a quick defeat of the Soviet Union had been dispelled. However, they did not gather to hear about the situation on the fronts. The new reality opened up the opportunity for the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. The fate of European Jews, who were treated by Hitler as hostages, stopped being a potential bargaining pin preventing Americans to join war. Since it was obvious that the fighting in the East would not end soon, it was decided that the Final Solution should not be postponed until the defeat of Stalin. But what does the term exactly mean? Under this euphemistic term lay a crime unprecedented in the history of mankind: the will to bring about the systematic murder of the Jewish population in Europe.

Almost all copies of the minutes of the Vannsee Conference (the Wannsee Protocol) were destroyed by those in their possession. Consequently, our knowledge about the meeting would have been much poorer, had Robert Kempner not come across the only surviving copy in 1947. This German lawyer and fierce enemy of the Nazis was actively involved in the Nuremberg trials after the war. Kempner immediately noticed the extraordinary importance of the Protocol and thanks to his meticulous approach to the prosecution and a little luck, a shocking document related to a turning point in the history of the Holocaust is known today.

Despite the euphemisms used in the Wannsee Protocol, the picture of the meeting that emerges from the document is horrifying. The conference was opened by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. He informed the audience that the aim of the meeting was to establish a common line of action regarding the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. At the same time, he stressed his key role in the implementation of the plans. On 31 July 1941, Herman Göring had already authorised him to take all necessary steps to this end. Over the course of six months, ideas concerning the involvement of specific Third Reich administrations changed, as did the aforementioned political situation, which slightly delayed the convening of the conference. In the end, Heydrich spoke to representatives of several ministries, offices and security police. Among those present were Wilhelm Stuckart, Secretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior, and Roland Freisler representing the Reich Ministry of Justice. The Nazi authorities in the occupied countries were represented by Hans Frank’s deputy, Josef Bühler, Secretary of State in the Government of the General Government and SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, Commandant of the Security Police and SD in Riga. Heydrich himself was, incidentally, at the same time Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The assembled listened to a summary of the existing policy towards the Jews and its limitations. In place of the forced emigration applied before, the concept of ‘evacuation to the East’ appeared. To illustrate the scale of the issue for the participants, data on the Jewish population in Europe were presented. Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s right hand man in the Final Solution, was responsible for compiling the data. After a lengthy enumeration, issues such as the organisation of ghettos for aging Jews and the fate of Jewish veterans who fought on the German side in the First World War were addressed. Later in the conference, Heydrich reminded the audience of who was a Jew under German law and presented a solution to the question of Mischlings (mixed-race people i.e. those with Jewish and non-Jewish ancestors). After a brief discussion, the meeting was closed, and the Chief of the Reich Security Main Office requested that the members of the meeting provide him with appropriate assistance in solving this ‘problem’.

In a meeting lasting barely an hour and a half, the fate of millions of people was sealed. But was the Wannsee Conference such a breakthrough? The German crimes against the Jews did not begin on 20 January 1942. However, it could be said that it was only from this date that ‘command genocide’ on an unprecedented scale began. The previous policy of forced emigration (practiced since the 1930s against German Jews) proved to be insufficient. In the political situation at the time, emigration to neutral countries was already on hold. In view of the size of the Jewish population in the territories occupied by the Third Reich, this solution could hardly have been considered feasible. Also unrealistic ware the ideas such as sending Jews to Madagascar. The only areas where they could be ‘evacuated’ were those captured by the Nazis in the east. Also, the policy of confining and slowly starving Jews in ghettos did not seem optimal. Starvation and labour were time-consuming. The racially obsessed Nazis also feared that by eliminating weaker individuals they would select the most resilient who could potentially revive the Jewish nation. The Wehrmacht’s war machine was followed by Einsatzgruppen units (full name ‘Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD’), which were to eliminate ideological and racial enemies in the rear of the army. However, the mass execution of civilians also had its drawbacks. It consumed time and valuable ammunition, and was a serious mental burden for most of the executioners. The Germans had been testing gas chambers for a long time. And it was this mean of mass executions that proved, with all other methods, to be the most desirable solution for the Nazis. They were faster, more efficient and allowed killing without direct contact between executioner and victims.

The Protocol of the Wannsee Conference contain a shocking sentence: ‘Europe is to be combed through from West to East in the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution’. According to the list drawn up by Eichmann, and included on page six of the Protocol, the expected victims were to be more than eleven million. One cannot help but notice, however, that some of his calculations are rather peculiar. The list was divided into countries and territories A (basically under the direct control of the Reich) and B (allies, neutral countries, but also those with whom Germany was at war). Especially with regard to the latter, the somewhat naive approach and wishful thinking is glaring. It seems that Eichmann assumed that in the future it will be possible to ‘evacuate’ all of the European Jews, which would had been only possible with the final triumph of the Third Reich.

In compiling his list, Eichmann had at his disposal various data, not always reliable or up-to-date. For example, only two hundred people belonging to the Jewish community were attributed to Italian-occupied Albania, although the country had been a refuge for thousands of Jewish expats since the 1930s. These and other details somewhat contradict the notion of meticulous, bureaucratic precision of the Holocaust plans. Estonia stands out in particular on the list, being described as Judenfrei (i.e. free of Jews). The country’s pre-war Jewish population was not one of the most numerous, and the various repressions or displacements that befell this minority after the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union further depleted it. The intensified activities of the German occupying forces and their Estonian collaborators meant that as early as January 1942, the country could be proclaimed (although exaggeratedly) as the country in which the Jewish question had been finally resolved. Anyhow, only individual people survived the war.

The sixth page of the aforementioned Protocol has become one of the symbolic illustrations of the Holocaust because it shows like no other document the pan-European scale and the unprecedented nature of the Nazis’ murderous plan. In 2022, on the 80th anniversary of the infamous conference, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (enrs.eu) and the Wannsee Conference House (ghwk.de) with the support of an international group of historians, have created an interactive website with infographics describing the history and contents of the sixth page of the Protocol. The infographics is available here: www.ghwk.de/statisticsandcatastrophe.

The aim of the project, called ‘Statistics and Catastrophe. Questioning Eichmann’s Numbers’, is to critically analyse the list, the statistics presented by Eichmann, and to show what tragedy is hidden in this bureaucratic document. The biographies of the victims are also an important part of the infographic – it is the victims of the Holocaust that we first and foremost need to remember about on the 80th anniversary of the Conference. Only a week later, on 27 January, there is another symbolic anniversary: the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which is commemorated as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

transl. Mikołaj Sekrecki

“The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second generation is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted; into history, or into myth.” (Hoffman 2004, xv)

INTRODUCTION

I am the child and grandchild of Holocaust, and what I call Diaspora, survivors. The effect of these traumatic events on my life is becoming more apparent as I get older until it became clear that I would have to trace their origins from the time of my parent's childhood up until now and begin to expose these hidden life-long feelings. The impetus for this journey began as an answer or explanation as to why I almost never say the words, 'I love you'. During my grandparent's war-torn generation the ability to express affection almost disappeared. It was as if expressing words of love after the horrors they had faced would somehow demean the enormity of the tragedy. If you could love again, then how bad could it have really been?

Innumerable stories have been written, and continue to be written even at this late stage, about the Holocaust and dramatic survival. As the population of original survivors is gradually disappearing, it becomes even more important for the next generations to gather as much of the factual information before it is too late. I have come to realize that not only had my mother’s family survived the Holocaust; but that my father's family had also 'survived' in pre-WWII Poland, living through anti-Semitic pogroms, emigrating to Palestine where they suffered enormously, eventually leaving for the United States, arriving in 1929 the year of the Great Depression.

All of them had experienced forced abandonment of the known to enter the unknown; changes in homeland, languages and names due to the historical, wartime events that were not in their control. These affected my parents and grandparents, and ultimately my generation as well. It is my purpose here to discuss the trans-generational traumatic effects that these experiences had had on a specific population, family being just one example. Eventually, we, the children and grandchildren will be required to come to terms with our ancestor's pasts as best as we can, incorporating them into our own lives; present and future.

It is my hope to begin this process as an intergenerational and international discussion. Many of us alive today have been affected by the Holocaust in some way; Jewish or not, survivors and their families or not, and yet we continue to relate to the Holocaust as if it had begun only recently. Unbelievably, we are a mere seventeen years from the centennial anniversary of the Nazi party's initial rise to political power in 1932. Any attempt to break the near-pervasive silence that has been the norm in war-torn, twentieth-century America, Europe and the world may hopefully yield positive results in unifying the global village of today.

Original Holocaust survivors hold a unique responsibility to continue to tell their own stories for as long as they can. One example of this is the autobiography, "Once We Were Eight" published when the author was 85 years old. In it he expresses his motivation for telling his own tragic story of survival including the loss of six out of eight members of his own family:

"'Zachor' – Remember. This has become my mission. I grab every opportunity that comes my way to share my history so that the Holocaust is not forgotten. One day, in the not too distant future, there will be no survivors to tell their stories, so it is imperative that I, and others like me, share their Holocaust experiences so that no one can ever doubt that the Holocaust happened. My goal is to educate students, and all who I encounter, so that they in turn will educate others. The history of the Holocaust must not die when survivors are not here to tell first-hand what happened during that terrible chapter in history. To me, it is still unbelievable and inconceivable that these horrific crimes were committed by civilized nations in the 20th century". (Fishler 2014, 156)

The Unter-Stanestie/ Vivos (Vivis) Pogrom: July 5-6, 1941

My mother and grandparents survived a pogrom which took place on July 5th and 6th, 1941 in the small village of Unter-Stanestie and in its tiny, neighboring, almost unknown, unmentioned village of Vivis (Vivos) in Romania (now Ukraine). A summary of the events are detailed below as part of a concise and accurate article:

“In Stanestii de Jos, a village east of Czernovitz…the locals organized a Ukrainian national committee to take control of the village ‘arresting’ the Jews and holding them in the mayor’s office or the saw mill. The Ukrainian nationalists soon began to murder their prisoners, and when the Russian army reached Stanestii de Jos, the pogrom was intensified. Upon his arrival, the Romanian gendarmerie’s commander put a stop to the blood bath, but by that time between eighty and one hundred and thirty Jews had already been killed. The fact that a local gendarmerie commander could stop a massacre underscores the fact that the impetus for pogroms often came from below... The Jews barricaded themselves in their homes, and the Ukrainians ‘patrolled’ usually armed with agricultural tools, for firearms were not widely available. The Ukrainians then decided to ‘fetch’ the Jews from their homes and concentrate them in one place. A list was compiled from which the names of the Jewish men were read out one by one, after which these were led away… Most of the Jewish men were beaten to death- only a few were shot….Chana Weisenfeld, who was …from Stanestii de Jos, related how Ukrainian neighbors rampaged through the village armed with hammers and sickles. According to Weisenfeld, more than eighty Jews were killed in the pogrom. Close to the village, local perpetrators killed a pregnant woman and beheaded her… The massacres of Jews by the local population sometimes seem especially puzzling because the perpetrators are civilians and the victims are their neighbors…. Later when it became clear that it was possible to murder with impunity, people murdered so that no one would be there to remember the stolen property.” (Geissbuhler 2014, 434-439)

The pogrom, like many others that occurred that summer of 1941, represented the Romanian's attempt to “cleanse the terrain” of its’ Jewish population. (Solonari 2010, 160) No Jews remained in Stanestie. My family’s survival was close to miraculous after my grandfather was captured and escaped. ChanaWeisenfeld, mentioned above, is my mother’s first cousin, aged 82 today. The pregnant woman, beheaded in the forest of Vivis, was my grandmother’s sister and my mother's aunt. Her name was Chaika. I am her namesake in Hebrew; Chaya, and in English; Carol.

Transnistria

After the pogroms, survivors travelled for several months, from July until October 1941, on foot or by wagon, surviving typhoid and horrid conditions, under constant Romanian guard until they reached the Transnistria concentration camps. My mother’s family survived. My great-grandfather did not. There, life under the harsh hands of the Ukrainian/Romanian/Nazi guards was exceedingly difficult.

Aharon Appelfeld, the prolific Israeli author, was born in Stanestie in 1932 like my mother. He survived the pogrom in which his mother perished and was sent to Transnistria. He describes life in the camp and the unendurable silence there. “During the war, one did not talk… Whoever was in the Ghetto, the camp and the forests, knows silence from within…The war is a hothouse of listening and of silences. Extreme hunger, quenching thirst, the fear of death makes words redundant. As a matter of fact, they are unnecessary. In the Ghetto and the camp only those who lost their sanity talked, explained and tried to convince. The sane did not talk.” (Appelfeld 1999, 95)

The history of the Holocaust in Romania is not well-known and even less well understood. This lack of clarity was due to the historical "unfolding of events…The fate of its Jews varied depending on the geographic areas where they lived …[and] the fact that Transnistria was not a part of the territory of Romania, but only under its administration, changing political circumstances and erratic government policies.”(Nizkor Project 1991, 1) This confusing geopolitical status ultimately led the survivors of Transnistria not to “talk about their tragedy because they were too traumatized…Their experiences were trivialized because Transnistria had not been publicly acknowledged for the tragedy it really was." (Bernhardt 1997, 1) As of 2004, a total of “between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews …were killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina by Romanian and German troops in 1941. Between 105,000 and 120,000 deported Romanian Jews died as a result of expulsions to Transnistria." There, "between 115,000 and 180,000 … Jews were killed.” (ICHR 2004, 306)

Politanki, Ukraine

Sometime soon after their arrival in Transnistria my mother's family received a reprieve of sorts that more than likely saved their lives. The Russian owner of a melon farm bribed guards to release 40-50 laborers from one of the camps. They were taken to a barn, each family to a room, and there they lived for close to three years near the tiny Ukrainian village of Politanki. They lived a mini-Schindler existence; hard labor in exchange for life, food, and advance notice if the Nazi or Romanian army approached. If they did, they were sent deep into the forest; food sent out to them and then brought back after the danger had passed. The farmer had been offered the highest award for saving Jews by the Israeli government; but he refused to accept it. Perhaps he had worried about future repercussions in his own country it became known that he had helped Jews and gone against his own government during WWII.

After the Holocaust

After the war ended, my grandparents returned briefly to Stanestie. There, killers roaming the forests were searching for and murdering any potential witnesses to the pogroms that had been carried out by local, non-Jewish villagers. Warned by a kindly neighbor, after spending a few hours at her home, they left before dawn, never to return. No wonder my grandparents left Romania as quickly as they could and ran to Germany, empty-handed. Nobody there was going to take responsibility for Jews who had survived anyway. The rapidly changing borders had made it convenient for many countries to say, ‘They aren't ours’. The lack of facts may be useful for those who say the Holocaust never happened on a large scale. As the last original survivors pass away, the voices of those who perished without gravestones will be extinguished forever. No, this concept is not new; but because of it I continue thework, to pay homage to members of my close family who I know had existed in Romania and Poland until July 1941.

PRESENT

 

Post-memory

Three-quarters of a century have passed since the beginning of WWII and we may ponder the continuing widespread interest in the Holocaust and its outcomes. Many of us are looking for connections to our pasts by trying to fill in the empty holes of what we have never known; the truth about the histories of our own families. It could be that I, like many of the group called second and third generation survivors of the Holocaust are cursed to go on a personal quest for answers, and were so cursed the moment we were born. Discussed by Eva Hoffman in her autobiography, she describes being the child of Holocaust survivors and what this may mean to her and others like her. She proposes that, “If I wanted to understand the significance for those who come after, then I needed to reflect on my own and my peers’ link to that legacy, to excavate our generational story from under its weight and shadow-to retrieve it from that ‘secondariness’ which many of us have felt in relation to a formidable and forbidding past.”(Hoffman 2004, xi)

I can use myself as an example of one who has experienced this search for knowledge and answers; the Holocaust as a 'rumor' or word that has no meaning, turned into a black hole of silence, sadness, depression, of those around me with no explanation. How could I be completely happy? I never felt like I truly fit in; now at least I know why. I may have been born in America, but my parents and grandparents were all of Eastern European, Austro-Hungarian background, mentality and culture; most having accents. I had always been proud to be American, but my 'Jewish-ness', 'child-of-Holocaust-survivor'-ness had always held a subconscious grip off-stage.
In order to explain what had motivated me to understand my mother's experiences during the Holocaust, we can examine the groundbreaking article, “The Generation of Post-Memory", where Hirsch purports the concept that memory of the Holocaust may be transmitted almost directly into the minds of the children of survivors:

"Post-memory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images, and behaviors. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and effectively as to ‘seem’ to constitute memories in their own right…To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. …These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the experience of post-memory.”(Hirsch 2010, 106)

We must continue to examine the impact that the Holocaust is having on the ‘next’ generations; how a child’s identity can become almost secondary to the heroic fact that their parent has survived the Holocaust. What achievement can rate next to that? It may come as no surprise that we, second generation Holocaust survivors, describe ourselves as such, as if wearing our own badge of courage. Self-esteem and identity have somehow been created out of their heroism. Hirsch and Miller describe the creation of the second generation’s self-identity through over-identification with the survivor parent and grandparent and reveal that “along with many other American Jews of our generation [we] have … devoted the last several years to the recovery of our own family stories and the search for lost Jewish worlds in Eastern Europe.” In addition, they suggest, “the legacies of the past transmitted powerfully from parent to child within the family…shape identity and …’post-memory’ can account for the lure of second generation’s …over-identification.”(2011, 4)
I can say that the Holocaust has had an incredible impact upon me even though I had never been part of it. I was born in a totally different country, environment and culture than my mother and my grandparents who had survived. As Hirsch explains, "post-memory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right."(2010, 103) Yet there have been several instances in my life when I mistakenly used the first person to describe things that had happened to my mother during the Holocaust, and instead said they had happened to me. Hirsch wonders if as children of survivors we may "adopt the traumatic experiences of others as experiences that we might ourselves have lived through, inscribe them into our own life story… [and have a] frustrated need to know about a traumatic past." (2010, 114)

Silence

It could be that the ‘Second Generation Survivor Syndrome’ begins in infancy. Halasz describes how the “second generation offspring witnessed that silence… those exiled moments when he, the infant was hungering for relatedness. Instead he met the survivor parent's ‘fated exile’, a wall of silence.” He adds, "there may be unexamined danger in being named after deceased relatives, in that parents may only see the dead relatives in their children and therefore not ever really see or know their own child…For the second generation survivor, this may mean that the child in turn may grow up having a blurred or undefined identity.”(2002, 217) I began to be interested in learning about the Holocaust at an early age. I now believe that having been named after an aunt killed during the Holocaust may have been the basis for this early onset.

Post-memory may have also played a role in my early life with much of the transmission conducted in silence. There were no discussions of the events that had taken place; not at the dinner table, not in the living room, not as I grew older. It was my own personal curiosity that led me to start searching; in college, on the Internet and later, on trips to every major city in Europe which had had a Jewish history beginning after the Inquisition. For example, Lily Brett, a second generation author, describes her relationship to her mother, a Holocaust survivor, in an interview entitled "Walking Among Ghosts". She explains, "I wanted to be one of them …I didn't want to be separated from [her] by this enormous gulf." (Giles 2000, 56)

I had grown up with the loud silence of knowing that there was something out there, but what? A loud, earth shattering scream of nothingness, that reverberated in my ears from the time I was born. I knew nothing, and continued to know nothing for years. I never got the message or information from the original source itself. This now is very frustrating, because I would like to have heard my grandfather tell me the story at least once in his own words, to hear his fear and feelings. I would have liked to hear my grandmother speak, even once, about anything at all, or about the day they left their hometown without my grandfather. What this must have felt like I can only imagine. My mother has written her story, and although now she will answer questions if I ask, it is still a bit like prying open a can of sardines. Is this why I keep so much inside?

In a contribution to "Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators" the second-generation writer Lisa Reitman-Dobi relates her feelings, which are eerily similar to mine:

"all my life I've felt a tremendous weight on me, something that I could not understand, although I knew it had something to do with the Holocaust….I knew that the war, the Holocaust specifically, was a topic that had been relegated to the topmost shelf, something that wouldn't be addressed. By the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I was aching to know details… I craved more information…. I was not completely ignorant. On the contrary, it was because I knew a fair bit about the war that my curiosity was piqued. I had always known about the Holocaust. I had always known about the concentration camps. I can't say how. It's as if I were born with a degree of information that had been genetically installed, like my brown hair and brown eyes. I knew that an isolated, distant horror, something that could never happen again, mind you, had severed the past from the present without a trace. I knew that my mother's family had been shattered by the war but….I had never seen her mourn or cry or show any anger at the injustice during her childhood. I sensed that I was required to appreciate the rich childhood that had been denied my mother. But instead of happy, I felt sad. I felt sad for my mother, sad for everyone, and then guilty for feeling sad…. The reality was that I was in a perpetual state of mourning for that which I had never known, as much as there was to know." (A. Berger and N. Berger, eds. 2001,16-19)

We, the second generation, have been relegated to remember the Holocaust as if in a virtual time-machine; almost as if we had been there ourselves. This may not happen to every survivor’s child, but similar to a gene, like alcoholism or diabetes; some of us have the predisposition to be the carrier of the message. This might be set off by incidents in our own lives or perhaps this is learned behavior, gleaned from the sad, introspective, smile-less face; slow movements or hunched-over shoulders of our grandparents; physical exhibitions of their own never-released inner traumas. As our own middle age encroaches, we may be able to reveal the truth.

Yes, indeed, without a doubt, our own identities were formed by their connection to that horrible, historical anomaly; duly transcribed and reported in every tiny, minute detail by the Nazis; the Holocaust. This is what we had to compete with. Is it any wonder that we have been spoiled almost to death? We, call us what you will, the second, third, next, future generations are bearing the brunt of the anger, sadness, unknowable, untellable loss that our parents and grandparents had suffered. We, connected to them by blood and sorrow, must build on this and move forward with the same type of strength and courage as it took for them to be able to survive. Whatever has happened to them is done. They will not tell us any more than we already know. It is this silence that the second generation has endured that has made it so important to get the facts straight now before it is too late.

Alan Berger and Naomi Berger ask two simple questions; "What is the second generation's connection to the Holocaust? Their parents suffered, but what have been the effects on the offspring?" (2001, 1) The painful answers that have been shut away for decades have been seeping out slowly in books and films during the past ten or twenty years. Whatever has been locked away by the power of silence and fear of exposure is making its way to the surface. And exposing what exactly are we talking about here? My grandparent's fear of being discovered to have survived the Holocaust while millions of others had not? Hey, you guys, you were the victims here. Remember? The fact is perhaps they had not wanted to talk about being victims of the most heinous crime against humankind known to man; keeping silent for most of their lifetimes. It could be that the survivors themselves were trying to maintain their pride as well as protect us from the knowledge of what they had gone through. Hirsch adds that in their creation of a "protective shield particular to the post-generation, one could say that, paradoxically they reinforce the living connection between past and present, between the generation of witnesses and survivors and the generation after." (2010, 125)

Possibly my grandfather had felt that if he maintained his silence, it would be as if what had transpired during those terrible years during the war had never happened at all. In her extraordinary analysis of Lily Brett's autobiographical story, "Things Could Be Worse”, Catalina Botez examines the function that silence fills for Holocaust survivors. She claims "that silence can equally 'voice and hush traumatic experience', that it is never empty, but invested with individual and collective meaning. Essentially, I contend that beside the (self) damaging effects of silence, there are also beneficial consequences of it, in that it plays a crucial role in emplacing the displaced, rebuilding their shattered self, and contributing to their reintegration, survival and even partial healing." (2012, 15)

I can apply her theory to my grandfather, who never spoke about his own personal trauma to me as a child or young adult. Did Silence help him create a new life in America, raise two children, and build a successful business? I suppose that the key word is ‘partial’ when describing the amount of healing a person can go through after incredible trauma, losing half of his siblings and his parents while he, himself, survived. My grandfather was a lovely man, generous, caring and always wanted the best for his family. His children and grandchildren were proof of his strength throughout the untold horrors he had faced during WWII. But the scars were deep, and in all the years that I knew him, except perhaps toward the end of his life, his expressions of warmth were minimal. I knew that he loved me very much. He never said so.

I cannot explain even to this day what caused this withholding of information; to keep one of the major catastrophes in the history of mankind inside; not shared with members of your own family. Botez suggests that "silence is never empty or devoid of meaning, but 'inhabited' by poignant content pointing to trauma, loss and an inability to understand or cope with … loss".(Botez 2012, 17)20 Would they have been able to tell their stories without breaking?
It was that exactly; that inhabited silence; the practically void, brief, uncompleted lives of my grandparent's sisters and brothers; and the Unmentionables, the Unborn; the brothers and sisters of my mother and my uncle, who cry silently without tears. THIS is the epicenter of our sad melodrama, those almost forgotten souls. Overdramatized? I don’t think so. This is the Truth as I know it. It is what we do with the knowledge now that is essential, not only for me and individuals like me, but as a jumping off point for universal discussion and repair. As in a court case where thousands are represented; so shall it be here.

Stanestie/Vivos 2007

Something changed in me after I visited Stanestie in 2007. It is clear to me that not much has changed there; only the universal shame, guilt and pain in the local citizens has remained. The residents who were born after the war feel somehow responsible for the actions of their parents and grandparents even though they had nothing to do with them. As the book title suggests, the “sins of the fathers” have stayed with them; with tears in their eyes. (Woods 2013) One man around my age leads us through the Christian cemetery to the collective gravesite for the Jewish victims of the pogrom, shaped like a Star of David with a small commemorative plaque written in English, Romanian, Russian and Hebrew; we comfort him.

Politanki 2015

Recently, I made a personal and very difficult journey to the Ukraine, whose goal had been to reach the tiny village of Politanki where my mother had been in hiding from October 1941 until the end of WWII. I was finally able to begin to understand what Transnistria had been at that time. In the words of a middle-aged Ukrainian woman who we had met there; she described to my barely-Russian-speaking cousin what had been told to her by her grandmother many years before. “Eleven kilometers from here there were ghettoes that were run by very bad Romanian Fascists." She added, “Here, there were Romanians too, but they were not so bad”. Trying to figure out if there had once been a melon farm in the area seemed a bit too much for our language barrier to cross.

This trip made by one child of one Holocaust survivor, travelling nearly a quarter of the way across the globe, on roads that were not roads, at border crossings that could not be imagined; an impossible, impulsive drive to find the truth and see it with my own eyes. Not because I did not believe that it had happened; but because it had never been truly explained to me in words; only in shadows and sketchy outlines that left no room for imagination. Reality, in all its glory, sadness, emptiness, colors of pale green endless wheat fields, nothingness, had been registered and claimed! I had come to the most complete understanding of what my mother had gone through that any survivor’s child could; only after an incredibly hard and unusual trip, involving chance coincidences, other people, several countries, diplomatic assistance and Russian translation of information that probably couldn't even be found on the English language World Wide Web. This, I was able to do, with thanks to those know who they are. Now that I have seen first-hand where it all took place, can I say that post-memory has become my memory, too? I am not sure. But, the fact is, I was able to put in the last piece of the puzzle; and the puzzle has been solved!

FUTURE

Today, nearing 80 years since the beginning of the Holocaust; the largest organized mass murder in history, we continue to ponder the source of its inception; the root of the wasted intelligence on an evil plan developed only to try to eradicate one of the most ancient peoples known to mankind, and there is no end in sight to our conversations.

However well-adjusted my mother was in her adopted country of America, the shadowy phantom of Eastern Europe still lingered above her, as it did all survivors. She may have tried to escape the vestiges of the Holocaust by losing her accent; feeling at home in the United States; working; getting married and raising a family. But, "their children, whom they have proudly raised in a free country carry their parent's burden of traumatic memories, not always sure of the extent of their harmful grasp." (Botez 2012, 24) There is no question that my mother was unaware of the potential influence that her own Holocaust experiences might have had on her children. It is this late knowledge and recent understanding that we are dealing with here, and must find the correct path on which to send the message out to the world. It has taken me fifty-eight years to get to this point of self-analysis and self-understanding. It is not for the lack of trying, many times, and many ways. Is it better late than never? You bet, especially for my children's sake and perhaps others as well. Perhaps writing it all down will lead the revelations in the right direction.

One of the main reasons that I don’t say ‘I love you’ often is because it wasn’t said to me by my mother as I was growing up. It could be said that wartime isn’t exactly the proper atmosphere for giving affection. ‘Normal’ emotional involvement of a parent to a child in expressions of endearment are reduced to a minimum or eliminated completely when the threat of death hangs over you daily like a tiny dew drop dangling from the edge of a blade of grass at sunrise. You know it will fall; it’s just a matter of time.

My mother told me that what she remembers of her early childhood before the war was happy go-lucky. She didn't have any young friends, but she remembers playing with workers in the lumber mill and enjoying herself. This must have come to such an abrupt, unexplained and unexplainable stop that whatever happiness she had enjoyed as a child had been buried forever, never to be retrieved even later on in life. How can a person who has suffered trauma like this be expected to raise a child herself in a traditionally 'normal' way, and so on in the following generations? This is the question being raised here.

At a recent book-signing event for my book,“I love you, they didn’t say", (Elias 2015) in which I deal in part with the lack of verbal affection from my mother toward me as a child; my mother, for the first time, began to understand what had had happened to her during the Holocaust.She described to visitors at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. how she had experienced an almost complete emotional black-out for approximately three years, from her parents towards her, and from herself towards the outside world. It was quite a cathartic, heart-wrenching and heart-warming experience for me to hear her speak, when at first she could not understand why I had entitled my book this way.

I don’t need results from studies on psychological responses in children of Holocaust survivors; I just have to look at myself and my brother as a two-case sample study. We are two specimens of a unique twentieth-century phenomenon and whichever way we have turned out will continue on and on until we stop it or at least try to. I know where this detached demeanor comes from and even though I do, I cannot change it. Maybe this work, which started out as a way of organizing the stories of my mother’s survival, has now turned into something much, much more. Those who had lived through hell and come out on the other side could not have possibly comprehended the effect it had had at the time and would have on them later on. They could not have imagined the effect it would have on their offspring, and on the children of their offspring.

This article may open the doors for discussions, NOT necessarily for the survivors themselves, but for those who have come after them. We have to start to breathe. I am not guilty, nor is my mother, father, grandparents, nor are any of them. The world is a dangerous place and becoming more so every day. God says we are supposed to stay alive under any circumstances. Life is sacred in its most natural form; it is what matters. Without humanity we cannot continue to report the progress of mankind to each generation that follows. This is our mission; our purpose: to learn, grow, teach; to educate those that are here with us today and will pass on the memories to those who will come next; our own future generations.

 

REFERENCES
1. Appelfeld, Aharon, “The Story of a Life”, Keter, Jerusalem, 1999.
2. Berger, Alan and Naomi Berger, eds. "Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of the Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators", Syracuse University Press , New York, 2001,
3. Bernhardt, Zvi, 'Introduction', "Transnistria: Lists of Jews Receiving and Sending Support", Jewish Gen, 1997-2015
4. Botez, Catalina, ""The Dialectic of Silence and Remembrance in Lily Brett's "Things Could be Worse"', Babilonia Numero Especial, 2012, pp. 15-29
5. Elias, Carol, "’I Love You, They Didn't Say’- Holocaust and Diaspora Survival : the Next Generations”, Orion Books, Israel, 2015.
6. Fishler, Raymond, "Once We Were Eight", http://www.thebookpatch.com. 2014
7. Geissbuhler, Simon, "'He Spoke Yiddish Like A Jew' - Neighbors Contribution to the Mass Killings of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia in July, 1941". "Holocaust and Genocide Studies", 28, no.3, Winter, 2014, pp. 434-449.
8. Giles, Fiona, "Walking Among Ghosts: An Interview with Lily Brett", Meanjin, Volume 59, no.1, 2000, pp. 54-69
9. Halasz, George, "Can Trauma be Transmitted Across the Generations?" in "The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children and the Holocaust", eds, Zygmunt Mazur, Fritz Konig, Arnold Krammer, Harry Brod, Wladylaw Witalisz, Jagellonian University Press, 2002, pp. 209-223.
10. Hirsch, Marianne, "The Generation of Post-Memory", Poetics Today- International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, Spring 2008, Vol. 29 (1), pp. 103-128
11. Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller, "'Introduction'- Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory", New York Columbia University Press, 2011
12. Hoffman, Eva, Introduction, "After Such Knowledge: Memory: History and the Legacy of the Holocaust", Public Affairs: Persus Books Group, 2004, pp. xv
13. ICHR, “Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania”, http://miris.eurac.edu/mugs2/do/blob.pdf?type=pdf&serial=1117716572750
14. The Nizkor Project, "Shattered! 50 Years of Silence: History and Voices of the Tragedy in Romania and Transnistria: The Unknown Killing Fields of Transnistria."
15. Reitman-Dobi, Lisa, "Family Ties: The Search for Roots: Once Removed", in A. Berger and N. Berger, eds. “Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of the Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators", Syracuse University Press, New York, 2001
16. Woods, James, "The Sins of the Fathers", www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/22/sins-of-the-father

The author about herself:
I am a fifty-eight year old woman who has been living in Israel for the past twenty-three years. I have two children, both who have served in the Israel Defense Forces. My son finished his service last year and is now studying Graphic Design. My daughter, who is an officer in her third elective year, is a liaison between injured soldiers and the Army, and regularly visits families who have lost loved ones while. I hold a Masters and Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from major universities in New York State. I worked as a Guidance counselor in New York City before moving to Israel and raising a family. I attained a permanent Teacher’s license in Israel, where I have been an educator and supervisor for over twenty years.