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‘Lost Girls’ Artwork from the Holocaust

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Marie Paneth and some of her students, all survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Photo: Columbia Studios. Prints and Photographs Division.

They are scenes filled with emptiness and born of the Holocaust: Streets with no people, houses with no one home, roads that stretch endlessly to no place.

A small collection in the Library’s Manuscript Division preserves drawings created by children who survived Nazi concentration camps during World War II — artworks that reveal the emotional state of young people who had endured unimaginable horror and lost everything but their lives.

In the months following the war, hundreds of those children — homeless and alone — were taken to facilities in London and the English countryside to be cared for. One of those helping the new arrivals was Marie Paneth, an artist and art therapist who had worked with children in a London air raid shelter a few years earlier and viewed art as good therapy for children who had suffered traumatic experiences.

The drawings held by the Library were made by 11 young Polish and Hungarian women, aged 16 to 19, who studied with Paneth at a London hostel beginning in March 1946. Paneth saved their work and documented their experiences in an unpublished book manuscript also held at the Library.

“The most vivid feeling they have,” she wrote, “is that of loss, of having lost and of being lost.”

An empty landscape, from the Paneth collection. Manuscript Division.

The girls shared similar stories: Their families had been torn apart, parents separated from children, brother from sister, never to be seen again. They’d witnessed unthinkable cruelty and suffering in the concentration camps and somehow survived — lost and alone, but alive.

Maria — in the manuscript, Paneth used pseudonyms for her charges — was one. Her mother died before the war, and Maria later witnessed the execution of her father and sister by the Nazis. She was sent to the notorious Auschwitz extermination camp, where she narrowly escaped the gas chamber. She later was detailed to a German ammunition factory desperate for workers, saving her life.

In London, Maria and the others grappled with what they’d seen and experienced, with the strangeness and loneliness of their new lives, with losing everything and everyone they’d ever known. They struggled, too, with the guilt of surviving while millions like them had perished.

“I live. Those who could not take a piece of bread out of the hands of somebody who was too weak to hold it did starve and could not keep alive,” Ellen told Paneth. “[Those] who could not walk over the bodies of dead people died. The worst ones survived.”

Their new life at the hostel didn’t come easily: They fought, stayed aloof from others, refused to do their chores — enough so that the hostel warden wanted them removed. Paneth came to work with them as a last resort. She taught the girls science and math, helping make up for the years of schooling they missed while trapped in Jewish ghettos and in concentration camps.

An empty road with no people, a typical feature of the survivors’ drawings. Manuscript Division.

She also met with them once a week to draw and paint. Their pieces in the Library’s collections convey their emotional state — despair, the feeling of emptiness, of being left alone without guide and support. “I wanted to paint a girl there,” Lena said of one of her drawings, “but I could not.”

Instead, they show endless and empty plains, roads leading nowhere, streets with no living beings, towns with no soul in sight. Only slowly did people begin to appear. Lena eventually drew one image with a person: a knight riding toward a house with a lit window.

A photograph in the Prints and Photographs Division shows Paneth with her pupils, their real names inscribed on the front and notes of thanks on the back.

Art, Paneth wrote, allowed these children to express through a medium other than words things that cannot be said in words — in images that, seven decades later, still haunt.

Comments (9)

  1. These are powerful and haunting. Thanks for sharing.

    Tami

  2. I recently watched a film entitled “KAPO” which tells the story of a girl/young lady who was sent to one of the concentration camps. The film follows her decision to survive, experiences similar to those of the young ladies in your article and the outcome. It is emotionally difficult to watch yet is a compelling and beautiful, uplifting account.

  3. Thanks so much for this. We have the most amazing things. Let us never forget.

  4. Thank you yet another interesting insight on the Holocaust and the aftermath. It was such a terrible time in history; and it helps to continue learn the many facets that make it up.

  5. Thank you for this. My parents were both Holocaust survivors who also lost all immediate and extended family. The Holocaust was hell on earth, but it continued after the war because of the pain of such immense loss & nightmarish memories. I always felt that our family was not enough because they wanted their families and their old lives back. Sadness was always just below the surface, and In a strange way, these pictures represent my life too because while I had my parents, I often didn’t really have them.

  6. Thank you for posting this tragic story. Marie Paneth’s compassion and understanding helped these traumatized young women to heal.

  7. Their trauma is shown through their art. They are really good. I found during Covid painting and drawing helped me to feel at peace when the news seemed to explode its uncertainties.

  8. Although nowhere near the level of trauma experienced by these young women, my own reaction to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is in some ways similar: the utter devastation; the empty streets, devoid of any life of any kind; the total emptiness. Lonely is a word that screams silently into a grey, dead void, when there is nothing left. Nothing. At. All. Gone; all is gone; all that remains in the aftermath is silence. It is unimaginable, unless you have experienced it.

  9. This Library of Congress is an amazing resource for this
    troubled world. Beautiful, dark & healing. Never forget.

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