Belated obit for Auschwitz artist (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
Each picture in the album- unusual because they were
done in color- was signed by the artist at the bottom, along
with the number 48035, which was tattooed on her arm by the
Nazis.
Zupya from Auschwitz is Naomi from Lohamei Hagetaot
By David Rapp
The testimony given by Vera Alexander at the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem focused on her memories of the women's
camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Visual, subjective memories, of
the sort that muted and faded over the years. Alexander, a
native of Slovakia, took the witness stand on June 8, 1961.
Gideon Hausner, prosecutor in the trial, presented the court
and the witness with an album of drawings that depicted
everyday life in Auschwitz.
Alexander was asked to look at several of the drawings. She
immediately identified the scene in which the women arrive
at the gate of the camp, and their hair is shaven. "We
ceased to be women," she dryly noted as the drawings were
shown to her. Afterward, she identified the beatings with
whips and the drawn out daily count-off; and also the
"sport" competitions, particularly the systematic torture at
the hands of the camp staff, including the kapo, who was
chosen from among the prisoners. Alexander hesitated a bit
when she was shown a drawing of dogs. "I never saw an SS
insignia on a dog," she finally said. "But is this how it
looked?" asked the prosecutor, referring to the general
picture arising from the drawing. "It was like that, but
even worse," she replied.
After her testimony concluded, the presiding judge asked the
prosecutor who drew this evidence from the camp.
"We received it from Mr. Dobkin of the Jewish Agency
executive," said Hausner. "It was drawn by a female prisoner
whom we have not succeeded in locating." The album was
introduced as evidence, labeled as T/1346, and the trial
went on.
Prisoner No. 48035
The identity of the anonymous artist remained unknown for
many years. She died without knowing what happened to the
album she created immediately after the war, even though she
noted in an autobiographical essay that she knew it had
served as evidence in the Eichmann trial. It seems that she
did not know how to work her way through the system in order
to retrieve her album.
It is unclear if representatives of the state made any
effort to ascertain what happened to the artist, even though
her name - Zupya Rosenstrauch - appeared at the bottom of
every drawing, along with the number 48035, which was
tattooed on her arm by the Nazis.
The album, containing 20 drawings in watercolor and ink on
paper, was sent after the Eichmann trial to the storerooms
of the Israel State Archive, and about 10 years ago was
transferred to the Yad Vashem museum. It was placed in a
glass display case in the permanent exhibition.
At the museum, the album was seen by Yehudit Shendar, who
became the senior curator of art at Yad Vashem in 1997. "As
part of my study of the large collection of artwork, I was
attracted to the album of drawings," relates Shendar. "I
pulled out the portfolio of the work that was in the Yad
Vashem archive. There I found a high-quality facsimile of
the drawings in the album, which was prepared at the time of
the Eichmann trial, but little other information. It said
that the album was prepared after the war, meaning that the
artist obviously survived the atrocities of the camp. I
decided that I had to find Zupya Rosenstrauch."
Shendar went to an archive in Germany that specialized in
information about missing persons from World War II.
Rosenstrauch's name appeared in the archive, with notation
of her year of birth (1920) and details of her place of
residence after the war (Warsaw). The source of the
information was the Polish Jewish Council. A request for
information from the current director of the council in
Warsaw, as well as from the Israel State Archive and the
archive of the Israel Police produced little new
information.
"We learned that Eliyahu Dobkin, a senior Jewish Agency
official who is mentioned by Hausner as the source of the
album, received the artwork during one of his visits to
Europe as an Agency emissary. We did not unearth any
information that might have led us to Zupya."
That information was eventually gleaned from an Auschwitz
journal - a precise report drafted each day by the camp
directorate - which is at the Auschwitz museum. On July 1,
1943, the journal notes that 805 Jews were collected for
transfer to Auschwitz from the Majdanek camp - 222 men and
583 women. The numbers issued to the new prisoners are
notated in the journal, including the number burned onto
Rosenstrauch's arm.
The journal also notes that that same day, a prisoner
attempted to escape from the train. One of the more
startling drawings made by Rosenstrauch depicts such an
escape attempt.
"Evidently, it was a non-Jewish Pole," says Shendar. "Most
of the Jews felt there was no reason to try to escape. They
would in any case be captured by the locals and murdered. A
Pole at least had a chance." The drawing shows thick smoke
billowing above the train cars, and the form of the escaped
prisoner falling down. Behind him is a soldier aiming his
weapon at the escapee.
Critical labor
A letter that accompanied the journal entry, which was sent
at Shendar's request from Auschwitz to Yad Vashem, noted
that Rosenstrauch was assigned to the construction unit in
the women's camp. "She was a professional draftswoman, and
the Germans considered her critical labor for the continued
construction of the camp," says Shendar. The drawing in
which Rosenstrauch depicted the women's infirmary in the
camp finds a parallel in her own biography: Another document
that arrived from Auschwitz concerns one of her visits to
the infirmary. In fact, the atmosphere of "normal" business
as usual that arises from the document is shocking.
"Rosenstrauch was sent on August 5, 1944 to a doctor, on
suspicion that she had developed diphtheria," says Shendar.
"The doctors sent her for tests."
The camp could not afford to lose a gifted laborer, even one
who was Jewish. Although Shendar received a copy of the
detailed results of the tests Rosenstrauch underwent in the
summer of 1944, she still did not know the fate of the
patient.
In early 2003, a man named Morris Vishograd arrived at Yad
Vashem, an artist and graphic artist living in New York. In
conversation with him, it developed that after the war, he
worked for the Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw. "We
asked Vishograd if by chance he had heard of Zupya," says
Shendar, "and he said that he had personally met her, and
that in a letter she sent him in 1946, Zupya mentioned that
she was waiting to receive papers that would permit her
immigration to Uruguay." Shendar decided to sound a public
appeal. Through Yaron Enosh's radio program on Reshet Bet,
she asked for the listeners' help in locating Zupya, but no
new information developed.
She is not in Uruguay
In the end, the mystery was solved in the same way it began:
through the viewing of an item displayed in the museum. "In
April, I received a call from a woman named Liliana Feldman,
who had seen Rosenstrauch album on display in the new Yad
Vashem art museum," says Shendar. Feldman met Rosenstrauch
after the war. She said that in the morning, Rosenstrauch
used to work for the Communist Party in Poland, creating
posters that venerated Lenin and Stalin, and in the evening
drew her memories of the camps for the Polish Jewish
Council."
Yad Vashem officials attempted to find Rosenstrauch's
address in Uruguay, Feldman was told. "Why Uruguay?" asked
her old acquaintance. "She immigrated to Israel and joined
Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. When she got married, she took her
husband's family name, Yudkovsky, and even changed her given
name to Naomi."
A quick search on the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot Web site
provided information about one Naomi Yudkovsky, an active
member of the kibbutz.
She died in 1996
"Yudkovsky had taken part in committees that decided on the
conferring of Righteous Gentile status at Yad Vashem," said
Shendar. "The woman, who visited here more than once, died
in 1996, the same year that her most important work of art
arrived at our museum, without her ever knowing what
happened to it."
Late last month, the two sons of Naomi Yudkovsky - aka Zupya
Rosenstrauch - visited Yad Vashem. Michael (Mickey)
Yudkovsky and Yigal Dekel Yudkovsky live with their families
in Tel Aviv. They came to Jerusalem to see the album their
mother drew. The two were already familiar with the album
from faded photographs in their home.
"Hanging in the kibbutz guestrooms are landscapes my mother
drew late in life," relates Mickey Yudkovsky. "The contrast
between the terror in the drawings displayed in Yad Vashem
and the pastoral nature of the landscapes is incredible."
"Their big surprise was seeing that the drawings were done
in color," says Shendar and admits there is something
symbolic to this. "A great deal of our visual perception of
the Holocaust is distorted," she adds. First because we
receive most of the data from the perspective of the brutal
soldier. Second, since the technology dictated documentation
in black and white." In our consciousness, the memory of the
Holocaust is drawn in monochromatic shades.
"We found out that Michael Yudkovsky, who returned last year
from a trip to Poland in search of his roots and who then
decided to try to find the album drawn by his mother, also
made an appeal on Yaron Enosh's program," says Shendar. "The
fact that we were searching for each other along parallel
lines is sad."
The glass display case in which Feldman saw the album drawn
by her old acquaintance from Warsaw is not the same display
case in which Shendar saw it. This past April, the all-new
Yad Vashem museum was opened to the public. Overshadowed by
the festive event, the opening of the art museum was
slightly delayed. Shendar and her staff had labored in the
past few years on its establishment. Appearing in the art
museum's permanent exhibit are 167 works from the
collection. About 300 other works are displayed in the main
Yad Vashem museum, but this is only a fragment of the
immense collection, which contains approximately 10,000
works of art, most of which are in warehouses.
"The art museum at Yad Vashem focuses on works created by
Jews and non-Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis," says
Shendar. "Most of it consists of paintings, since barely any
three-dimensional works survived. Photographs belong to
either Yad Vashem's historical collection or the artifacts
collection, not to us."
Hundreds of works are on display on Yad Vashem's Web site.
"We are in no rush to put all of the works on the Internet,
out of a concern that improper use might be made of them,"
says Shendar. "These are sensitive materials. On the one
hand, they are visual testimony, and on the other hand, they
reflect artistic freedom that existed even in the most
difficult periods."
Of the thousands of items on display, there are quite a few
in which the identity of the artist and his or her fate is
unknown, or whose biography is incomplete. One example of
this is the story of the Sheft family. After Emil Sheft, a
bank manager in Warsaw, was shot to death in the street by
the Germans, his wife Marila and daughter Inca moved into
the ghetto. A Polish woman named Kazimira Lukashik risked
her life in 1942, smuggling the mother and daughter and
another girl into her home, which was outside the ghetto. An
informer revealed it to the Nazis, and the Gestapo raided
the home. The owners of the house and the three Jewish women
were saved from execution by a bribe offered to the raiders,
but it was clear they could no longer stay there.
A few years ago, Shendar met Lukashik's son in Poland. He
filled in some of the gaps, explaining that the three Jewish
women fled to a rural area. There, as far as was known, they
were killed. Among other things, they left a self-portrait
painted by Marila and a portrait of her father. Among the
"Pages of Testimony" that have been submitted to Yad Vashem
over the years is an eyewitness account from a woman named
Aliza Wurzheiser, a relative of the Sheft's, and it
corroborates the story told by Lukashik. Shendar says that
Yad Vashem has still not succeeded in tracking down a
relative of the family, even though it is known that she
lived in Israel.
Nevertheless, some of the stories do find closure. In the
charcoal portraits clandestinely drawn by Alter (Arthur)
Ritov in a camp in Riga, Shendar sees an antithesis to the
Nazi aspiration to strip the victims of their individual
uniqueness, and relate to them as forms lacking any personal
worth.
Ritov hid the portraits in a garage on the camp grounds, and
brought them to Israel when he immigrated in 1970. He also
retained notebooks in which he briefly described the people
he drew. One was Tzemach Weinrich, a butcher from Latvia,
"who is immensely strong." Ritov wrote that Tzemach Weinrich
was assigned the job of loading German army vehicles onto
the trains sent to the front, and that he would sabotage the
railcars. "Eventually they caught him in the act of
sabotage, and hung him in the ghetto," Shendar says.
She and her team unearthed documentation related to Tzemach
Weinrich, and even made contact with his brother's wife. The
information about him is chillingly illustrated, in black
and white, in the charcoal drawing secretly made by Alter
Ritov, less than two years before the end of the war.