Helena Bohle-Szacki

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Helena Bohle-Szacki in 2008

Helena Bohle-Szacki (born February 27, 1928 in Bialystok ; † August 21, 2011 in Berlin ) was a German-Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust , fashion designer and artist. She was considered the first post-war Polish fashion designer to make a name for herself outside the iron curtain.

Helena Bohle-Szacki as a young woman in 1938

Life

Helena Bohle-Szacki, also called Lilka by friends and family, grew up in a middle-class family in Poland . Her father Alexander Bohle worked as a textile engineer in a senior position. Helena Bohle-Szacki's mother, Maria Fanny (née Tobolska), an assimilated Jew from Lodz , looked after her and her half-sister Irena Aronson-Bohle, the child from the mother's first marriage, at home. When Hitler came to power , her father changed from German to Polish citizenship. From 1939 to June 1941, at the time of the Soviet occupation after the attack on Poland , the family remained largely unmolested by the events. In July 1941, the German occupation forces set up a ghetto in Bialystok , into which Helena Bohle-Szacki's mother and Irena had to move. After the ghetto was closed, they went into hiding with the help of their father. Meanwhile, Irena was found by the Gestapo and shot. Until 1944 Helena attended illegal school lessons, which she completed with the Abitur . In April 1944 she was arrested and in custody transferred to the Bialystok Gestapo prison. Her father tried unsuccessfully to get her released.

In June 1944, Helena Bohle-Szacki was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and forced to work. There she made her first drawings. In autumn 1944 she was transferred to the Helmbrechts concentration camp. Until April 1945 Helena worked on the lathe for the Neumeyer armaments company , which was relocated to the former Joseph Witt weaving mill in Helmbrechts after the bombing of Nuremberg . From April 1945 she was involved in the death march from Helmbrechts to Volary, during which the prisoners wandered around the border area between the Soviet and American fronts. On May 7th, she was liberated by American troops in the Zwodau concentration sub-camp . Then she returned to Bialystok alone, traveling by train through Dresden and Warsaw . Helena Bohle-Szacki moved with her parents to Lodz, where she recovered from various diseases such as tuberculosis .

In 1947, at the age of 19, she got her first marriage to the much older doctor Benedykt Wine. During Helena Bohle-Szacki's student days, her father committed suicide in connection with the Stalinist repression in 1950 and she married Jerzy Urbanowicz for the second time. Helena Bohle-Szacki's mother could not endure the death of her husband and went into exile, first to Israel and later to Brussels . In 1963 Helena Bohle-Szacki moved to Warsaw and began her third marriage with Wiktor Szacki, for whom she left her second husband.

After first establishing professional contacts in western countries, she changed her place of residence in 1968 and from then on lived in West Berlin . One reason for their emigration was anti-Semitism in Poland. Helena Bohle-Szacki and her husband Wiktor Szacki originally wanted to settle permanently in London . A stopover in West Berlin was necessary for this, but the formalities for the payment of compensation for the suffering suffered in the war, which Helena Bohle-Szacki was entitled to, dragged on, which is why they broke off the onward journey to London and settled in Germany . From the 1980s onwards she also took part in solidarity campaigns for Poland. For example, she got involved with Polish emigrants in Berlin and let poor students live in the Szackis' home, which made the couple's apartment known as the “Szacki Hotel”. The Szacki couple made the acquaintance of many intellectuals and held cultural salons in their apartment. In 1985, a private Berlin congress of Polish culture in exile was also held there regularly . She also helped the Polish trade union Solidarność organize strikes, donated material allowances for those involved in the war and their relatives, and also called on her German acquaintances to help because she saw herself as a political refugee. In 1994 she received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for her support and got her Polish citizenship back.

In 1983 she separated from her third husband. In 1993, her significant other committed suicide. No children emerged from their relationships; the traumatic experiences had led to infertility in Helena Bohle-Szacki. In the last years of her life she reported on her war experiences, in 2005 the forced labor archive conducted an interview with her in Polish. In the 2006 film project Erased. She also appeared in an interview with Bialystok and its Jews . In 2011 a contemporary witness interview with her took place in the Jewish Museum Berlin , which was part of the exhibition Forced Labor. The Germans, the slave laborers and the war arose. Helena Bohle-Szacki died on August 21, 2011 of heart failure in Berlin. In 2018, the Lette Association organized a commemorative event on the occasion of her 90th birthday.

Career

From 1947 to 1953 Helena Bohle-Szacki studied at the State University of Fine Arts in Lodz in the field of graphics and obtained her diploma . Among other things, she studied with the painter Władysław Strzemiński .

It was not easy for her to find work after graduation because the advertising industry was not yet well established. First she worked for a Łódź daily newspaper, Dziennik Łódzki , and later for the well-known fashion magazines Uroda and Moda . Eventually she worked as a fashion designer in Lodz and Warsaw. Until 1963, Helena Bohle-Szacki drew fashion sheets, worked as a journalist, lectured in fashion at her former university and finally designed clothes herself. She also built up an intellectual circle of friends. She was employed in the Central Laboratory of the Clothing Industry and in the three most famous Polish state fashion houses of the 1960s in managerial positions: Telimena , Moda Polska and Leda . In 1965 a fashion show with her collection took place in West Berlin in the famous Europa-Center . This was positively received by the press.

After her emigration, Helena Bohle-Szacki was also active in the field of fashion in Germany, initially as a lecturer and seamstress for a textile company at adult education centers, and later she received teaching positions in visual communication and graphic composition at the Lette School. She got this job through the commitment of her students, who preferred Helena Bohle-Szacki to a German competitor. At the same time, she was self-employed as an artist and had to take early retirement for health reasons.

Between 1986 and 1999 she ran the gallery at the Polish Club of the Catholic Intelligence in Berlin, where she tried to improve the image of Poles in Germany. With the help of the club, Helena Bohle-Szacki published two albums of her works: Ślady i cienie (Traces and Shadows), geometric abstractions, and Od drzewa do drzewa (From tree to tree) with trees as a theme - two of the most important motifs of her work. At first, her works only met with approval in small galleries, until she was able to exhibit her graphics and drawings in Copenhagen , Paris , Warsaw, Prague and London. From 1974 to 2005 she took part in over 40 solo exhibitions, and has also participated in various group exhibitions internationally. The long-term project Mosty - the bridges , which was financed by the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” foundation , is intended to commemorate Helena Bohle-Szacki's work . In 2017, an exhibition dedicated to her took place in Białystok in this context, and an exhibition was also planned in Berlin to allow other artists to reinterpret Helena Bohle-Szacki's works.

Works

  • traces, shadows. Drawings and records . Slowo Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-8-390-30036-8 .
  • From tree to tree. Drawings by Helena Bohle-Szacki and all kinds of poetry . Verlag Slowo, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-8-390-30037-5 .

literature

  • Gazeta Wyborcza: Helena od Telimeny. Posłuchaj opowieści o zapomnianej projektantce . July 12, 2017 ( online, restricted access, Polish ).
  • Hanna Rydlewska : Helena Bohle-Szacka. Pierwsza powojenna Kreatorka, o której usłyszą za żelazną kurtyną . In: Gazeta Wyborcza, July 29, 2017.
  • Interview with Helena Bohle-Szacki. In: Słowo / Das Wort 82, year 2009.
  • Jacek Bocheński: Zmarła Helena Bohle-Szacka . In: Gazeta Wyborcza, August 25, 2011 ( online, restricted access, Polish ).
  • Marcin Różyc (ed.) : Helena Bohle-Szacka . Lilka . Galeria Sleńdzińskich, Białystok 2017, ISBN 978-83-64413-17-9 (Polish / English).
  • Marzena Bomanowska: Zmarła Helena Bohle-Szacka, graphic from Łodzi i Berlina . In: Gazeta Wyborcza, August 22, 2011 ( online, restricted access, Polish ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Monika Stefanek: Helena Bohle-Szacki (p. 1). Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Forced Labor Archive: Short biography Helena Bohle-Szacki. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: Helena Bohle-Szacki. A German-Jewish Polish woman in a concentration camp and emigration | bpb. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
  4. ↑ a b c d Monika Stefanek: Helena Bohle-Szacki (p. 4). Retrieved May 8, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Forced Labor Archives: Interview with Helena Bohle-Szacki. Retrieved May 12, 2020 .
  6. ^ A b Lette-Verein: From Białystok to Berlin. Retrieved May 12, 2020 .
  7. ^ Jewish Museum Berlin: Conversation with a contemporary witness with Helena Bohle-Szacki. Retrieved May 12, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Bohle-Szacki, Helena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, fashion designer and artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Bialystok
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 2011
Place of death Berlin