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Olga Siemaszko's works: the "Hand of the Dead" project

The museum's collection of Olga Siemaszko (1911-2000), an outstanding illustrator and one of the most important post-war graphic artists in Poland, consists of her photographs and works. Photographs – these include private photographs and studio portraits, as well as portraits at work. Works – mainly from a single project – were prepared for the book "Ręka umarłej" (Hand of a Deceased)(1971), a volume with the camp prose of Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska, an Auschwitz prisoner, and the poetry of Władysław Broniewski.

Olga Aleksandra Siemaszko came from Kraków, and was the daughter of Abram Josek Binder and Frajda née Glasscheib. During the war, she initially stayed in Soviet-occupied Lviv (where she maintained close contacts with the Broniewski family). After the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union, she hid in Busko-Zdrój, Częstochowa, Cracow, Warsaw. Her husband, Andrzej Siemaszko, died, aged less than 30, in 1942.

After the war, she mainly dealt with illustrations for children, and is the author of, among others, iconic illustrations for "Alice in Wonderland", "Pinocchio", "Tom Thumb" and "The Locomotive". "Ręka umarłej" (Hand of a Deceades), published by "Książka i Wiedza" publishing house in 1971, thus occupies a special place in her artistic work: both as a book for adults, one of her few such works, and as probably the only project in which she refers directly to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Siemaszko did not publicly reveal her Jewish roots, nor did she directly address Jewish or Holocaust themes in her work.

The book itself is a puzzling publication. It is a volume containing reprints of works from the volume "Opowiadania oświęcimskie" (Auschwitz Stories) by Zarębińska-Broniewska – first published in 1948 (after the author's death), reprinted in 1960, while in "Ręka umarłej" they are printed in a changed order and enriched with her husband's poems. The new structure has given the publication, originally stories-testimonies, a mournful character in memory of the author. This aspect is influenced by the context of time: the edition was published in March, the period of the Polish People's Republic's anti-Semitic campaign, which was another stage of the persecution against Jews that had been developing since the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967. Is it therefore not paradoxical that the book was published in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Although the author of the stories, an Auschwitz survivor, was not Jewish, there is no doubt that at least some of the people portrayed by Zarębińska-Broniewska are Jewish. But on the other hand, the book does not expose, also thanks to the above-mentioned arrangement of content, the Jewish threads and Jewish roots of the victims in Zarębińska-Broniewska's prose images (and the fact that she was not Jewish fit perfectly into the Polish-centric propaganda narrative about the Auschwitz camp). Let us also note a puzzling fact, indicated in the footnote of the publication of "Ręka umarłej": the material was prepared as early as April 1969, but waited for its publication until February 1971. It waited for permission to print, and was, as we may suppose, therefore reworked, "corrected" by the censors.

Przemysław Kaniecki

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