Herstories of World War II: Artistic Practices of Three Female Artists in Poland

The issue of representation of the Second World War and the Holocaust constituted an urgent question in the visual arts in Europe in the second half of the 1940s. This question had an added intensity in many countries of the war-ravaged Eastern Europe as debates about the representation of war fused with politically saturated disputes about the place of realism in contemporary art. Surprisingly, this highly unstable art field, where no hegemonic narrative or style has yet been established, created possibilities for articulation of divergent memories and images, some of which were later suppressed or marginalized with the advent of Soviet control in the region.

This presentation focuses on analyzing the artists’ agency in narrating their stories of survival following the histories of three female artists in early post-war Poland: Maja Berezowska, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz and Zofia Rosenstrauch— as well as how these herstories intervened in the field of public memory. Berezowska and Simon-Pietkiewicz survived Ravensbruck, the largest concentration camp for women in the Third Reich. After their liberation, the two artists organised exhibitions of their camp work in Sweden (where they were refugees) and later in Poland. The Jewish artist Zofia Rosenstrach (later Naomi Judkowski) survived Auschwitz and designed two highly relevant exhibitions dedicated to the Holocaust at Majdanek (1946) and Auschwitz (1947), the first of which brought to the fore experiences of women. Considered together, these practices form a rare trace articulating female experiences of the war. The presentation will unpack their potential for today.