Gallery 8: POSTWAR YEARS, 1944 TO THE PRESENT
“The calamities of the war don’t count for me,” declared the artist Alina Szapocznikow. She had survived the Pabianice and Łódź ghettos and the Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt camps, but rarely referred to her wartime experience in her work. She did however enter the competition for an International Monument to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Raised in an assimilated family, Szapocznikow considered Jewishness – and her wartime experiences – a private matter. After the war she studied in Prague and Paris and, in 1951, returned to Poland, where she was active in artistic life. She died in France in 1973 at the age of 47.