Objects

A drawing of a lying female head in profile, with open eyes and a drooping corner of her mouth.

A horizontal line of the plane on which the head lies, delicately outlined in pencil, and in one place, on the right, also in ink.

It is the head of a deceased Auschwitz prisoner drawn as an illustration of the short story "Szczury" (Rats) by Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska. The drawing in the volume "Ręka umarłej" (Hand of a Deceased) opens this short story. The heroine-narrator sees in it, in one of the barracks for the sick, a female body that – which is not shown in the illustration – bears traces of having been slightly eaten by rats. Excerpt from the text: "Two prisoners from the hospital staff were taking the shirt off the corpse. The corpse was terribly thin. Terribly wide, glass eyes looked straight at the sky. The bottom of the face was one terrible, large wound. Her stomach too. It was the first corpse I saw in Auschwitz” (p. 53).

At the time the object was donated to the collection, it was on a backing and in a passe-partout, in pencil in the lower left corner (oriented towards the side edge), Olga Siemaszko indicated the page on which the drawing was to be printed: 'Page 52' (the illustration actually ended up on this page, in its upper part).

Przemysław Kaniecki