Photograph of an Jewish girl from Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), Hanna, last name uknown, who is believed to have perished in the Holocaust. She is shown seated, indoors, against a background of a patterned macrame (?), leaning with her back against a light-coloured cushion. She looks into the lens. She is wearing a checkered costume with an open jacket (up to her elbows), under which a white shirt is visible. She wears a bracelet or watch on her left forearm.
The photo has been preserved among the memorabilia of friends, the Model family. As the donor, Jerzy Model, son of Władysław and Zenobia, pointed out in a letter to the POLIN Museum, the photograph was described by them as a picture of “aunt Hanka who went to the ghetto”. The woman was probably a peer of the Models, born in the first decade of the 20th century. (Władysław was born in 1900, Zenobia in 1909). The donor found no notes on this friendship - neither in the documents, nor, for example, on the envelope in which it was kept alongside other photographs and documents from Lviv (the photograph must have been taken from Lviv together with other memorabilia in July 1945, when Zenobia Model and her sons were leaving for Gdańsk, where Władysław Model had already been staying since May and was working with Gdańsk tram system being launched).
The photograph could not have been taken later than autumn 1941, since the ghetto in Lwów (then renamed to Lemberg) was established by the Germans at the end of 1941.
From a letter by Jerzy Model: “Before the war and during the occupation, we lived in Lwów, on the Sygniówka estate. It was a new estate of semi-detached houses, with large gardens, located on the edge of the town, close to meadows and the Białohorski Forest. Every Sunday, friends of the parents 'from the city' would come down to relax - as they said - in the countryside. Among these numerous 'aunts' and 'uncles' was 'Auntie Hanka'. Visits were also made in the 'Soviet' and 'German' period. I don't remember exactly (I was six-seven years old at the time) when people at home started saying: 'Hanka has gone to the ghetto'. It was spoken of as something extraordinary. Today I can describe that there was horror, grief and awe. From later conversations between her parents, I know that Hanka was offered to hide among friends, but she did not want to leave her mother alone and they went to the ghetto together.
I don't know the last name of 'Auntie Hanka', there is no trace of her among other memorabilia from Lwów”.
compiled by Przemysław Kaniecki