Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Spotlights Holocaust Survivors Art in Kniznick Gallery

Brandeis Stories

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Spotlights Holocaust Survivors Art in Kniznick Gallery

By Naomi Ihueze '28
March 6, 2026

Without photographs or any real documentation that truly reflected the horrors of the Holocaust, survivors often turned to art or illustrations to offer their memories as testimony to the suffering they endured.

A new exhibition by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, "Who Will Draw Our History? Women's Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949," focuses on the often under-represented story of women who survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and outside the Warsaw ghetto.

Curated by Rachel E. Perry, the exhibit showcases 10 artists' little-known "books of memories": wordless novels, handmade albums, pictorial diaries, illustrated books and portfolios.

A map at the entrance details each artist's journey from their birth, to their persecution journeys, and the places they ended up afterwards. Four of these artists were in the same concentration camp, using their skills to survive the horrors they faced. Their talent may have afforded them privileges - for example, a portrait sketched in exchange for extra rations.

These pieces document the brutality prisoners of the camps faced. The artists - Ágnes Lukács, Edith Bán Kiss, Ella Liebermann-Shiber, Elżbieta Nadel, Lea Grundig, Luba Krugman Gurdus, Mária Turán Hacker, Regina Lichter-Liron, Zofia Rozenstrauch, and Zsuza Merényi - skillfully tell the stories of people who did not survive the Holocaust. Through their unique experiences, they were able to demonstrate aspects that are consistently ignored, including bereavement, motherhood, and sexual violence.

"Who Will Draw Our History?" covers several gaps in our knowledge about the Holocaust, including the experience of women who survived the slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

"The majority of survivors were men, so even when they represented what happened to women, it was not from a women's perspective," Perry said. "This exhibition is works by women about women," she said.

It also upends the assumption that right after the war, survivors did not talk about their experiences, Perry said, noting that there were, in fact, varied ways that survivors undertook what she called a "call to duty" to show the world their experiences.

Perry said she also wanted to focus on the specific genre. Holocaust survivors made many different works right after the war, but one of the more unique themes to emerge was what Perry describes as a "graphic narrative": something different from the modern understanding of the graphic novel.

"It's not a single work, it's a sequence of works that use visual storytelling to tell a story from beginning to middle to end," Perry said. "It has a kind of logic to it that a single work of art wouldn't have."

Referring to the artists as "first-responders," Perry researched the women's lives in detail to piece together their works from across the globe. In some cases, Perry reached out to family members to acquire multiple pieces to tell the full story of their experience. In other cases, she reached out to multiple museums to display copies, videos, or originals of each survivor's artwork.

"Who Will Draw Our History?" is part of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute's mission of promoting scholarship and art at the intersection of Jewish studies and women's and gender studies, through art exhibitions, academic journals, residencies and public programs. Part of this mission includes showing ways that women experienced the Holocaust differently than men.

The exhibition opened Jan. 27, will run through April 30 in the Kniznick Gallery, in the Women's Studies Research Center inside the Epstein Building.