The assemblage is inspired by the artist’s childhood experience as the child of a Holocaust survivor. It also serves as a memorial to the Wortsman family, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. The artist’s mother, Gisela Wortsman, survived her time in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. As a child, the artist could not ask her about her wartime experiences because her mother did not want to talk about them. However, years later, in response to spontaneous questions from her grandchildren, Gisela Wortsman began to recount her own story and that of her family during the war.
The work takes the form of a wooden box made from a drawer, filled with plastic dolls and paper cut-out figures. The central elements of the composition are the paper silhouettes placed in the middle ground; in front of them, in the foreground, and behind them in the background are plastic dolls. The paper figures represent the Wortsman family, and their appearance is inspired by a black-and-white photograph that served as the starting point for the work. The paper silhouettes depict Mosze Wortsman, Dwora, his wife, and their children: Gisela, Halina, and Romek. According to the artist, the photograph was taken around 1934 in Kraków and shows the Wortsman family walking in the Planty Park on a Friday afternoon, on their way to Kazimierz to celebrate the Sabbath at their grandmother’s home (the father is carrying a chicken intended for dinner).
The dolls representing young men evoke youth associated with the Hitler Youth organization and thus serve as a metaphorical representation of the times in which the artist’s mother grew up, as well as a foreshadowing of the impending tragedy of war: Mosze Wortsman, Dwora Wortsman, and their son Romek perished in the Holocaust.
The yellow dolls in the foreground, depicting young girls, are meant to represent the artist’s daughters. The presence of the artist’s children can be seen as a sign of passing on the history of the Wortsman family to future generations and of preserving family memory.
In the lower part of the work, there is a row of metal badges with swastikas, which Gisela’s husband and the artist’s father brought from West Germany, where he regularly traveled as a lawyer fighting for compensation for Holocaust survivors. The box has small doors on which the numbers tattooed on Gisela and Halina’s arms when they were prisoners in Auschwitz are inscribed. Buttons and a miniature clothes hanger in the upper part of the box recall the work Gisela was forced to perform during her imprisonment - sewing uniforms for the Germans.
The artist sources materials for her works at flea markets. | ML
