Current Exhibition
Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949
Rachel E. Perry, PhD, Guest Curator
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Kniznick Gallery | January 27 - April 30, 2026
Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 am-4 pm | Friday and Sunday 12 pm-4 pm | Closed Saturday
Helmar Lerski (1871-1956), Hände einer Graphikerin (lea grundig), Ca. 1944. Vintage print, 11 7/8 x 9 ½ in., [Series: Menschliche Hände’ | ’Human Hands’}, Courtesy of Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
Between 1944 and 1949, scores of survivors created graphic narratives of their personal and collective experiences under Nazi persecution. Who Will Draw Our History? introduces ten Jewish women who survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and outside the Warsaw ghetto under “Aryan” papers and then, days after their liberation, began recording their memories in images and words. Lacking photographs of what they witnessed and endured, they turned to visual storytelling to represent Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, particularly as it affected women.
Featured Artists: Lea Grundig (1906-1977), Luba Krugman Gurdus (1914-2011), Mária Turán Hacker (1886-1967), Edit Bán Kiss (1905-1966), Regina Lichter-Liron (1920-1995), Ella Liebermann-Shiber (1927-1998), Ágnes Lukács (1920-2016), Zsuza Merényi (1925-1990), Elżbieta Nadel (1920-1994), Zofia Rozenstrauch (1920–1996).
This exhibition showcases their little-known “books of memories”: wordless novels, handmade albums, pictorial diaries, illustrated books and portfolios. Culled from private collections and museum archives around the world, these works contribute vital evidentiary material about the Holocaust, but they also reveal how the “return to life” was experienced and represented. In so doing, they radically transform how we understand the role and reach of art in early survivor publications, exhibitions, and community building.
Arriving at a crucial moment, as we near an age “after testimony,” Who Will Draw Our History? brings together these works of early Holocaust memory for the first time, placing them within their historical and cultural context.
Brandeis cosponsors: Brandeis President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, Brandeis Library, The Center for German and European Studies, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. Community cosponsors: Studio Israel (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, Vilna Shul), The German Consulate of Boston, The Israeli Consulate of Boston.
We are deeply grateful to the Host Committee Chairs, individual members, and cosponsors for generously supporting Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1944. Their financial support has made it possible for us to to borrow, share, and responsibly steward important art loaned from collections around the world including the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Ravensbruck Museum, The Hungarian Jewish Museum, private collections, and others.
HBI will offer public programs as well as group tours for participants of all ages for this exhibition. For more information, please reach out to Cheryl Weiner, HBI Engagement Specialist.
RACHEL PERRY received her doctorate in Art History at Harvard University and teaches visual culture in the Weiss-Livnat Holocaust Studies program at the University of Haifa and at Gratz College. Her research focuses on the representation and memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War in the visual arts of the immediate postwar period. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty, the National Gallery, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Yad Vashem, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her articles have appeared in October, History and Memory, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, French Cultural Studies, RIHA, Art Bulletin and Ars Judaica, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. As a curator, she has mounted exhibitions and authored catalogues such as Arrivals, Departures: Salvaged Art Works by Persecuted Jewish Artists in Paris at the Hecht Museum. She has published widely on visual ethics, Yizkor books, found footage, reproduction, reenactment, graphic novels and visual testimony. She recently edited a special issue of The Journal of Holocaust Research on early Holocaust exhibitions. While in residency at HBI, Perry worked on her current manuscript on which Who Will Draw Our History? is based.
Press and Media
Events
Collection of Six Graphic Holocaust Books. Copyright, Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection. Photographer, Noam Feiner.
January 27, 2026
Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Image: Collection of Six Graphic Holocaust Books — Zofia Rozenstrauch, Auschwitz Death Camp, Warsaw, 1945; Regina Lichter, 1939-1945, Florence, 1946; Lea Grundig, In the Valley of Slaughter, Tel Aviv, 1944; Agnes Lukacs, Auschwitz Women's Camp, Budapest, 1946; Luba Krugman Gurdus, They Didn't Live to See, New York, 1949.
This event has passed.
(L) Helmar Lerski, "Lea Grundig Drawing Hands", c. 1944, © Galerie Berinson, Berlin. (R) Rachel Perry, Victoria Aarons, Tahneer Oksman, Charlotte Schallié.
February 10, 2026
4 - 5 pm EST | Online
As a companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, we will host an online panel discussion with experts on contemporary Jewish women's graphic novels. Moderated byWho Will Draw Our History? guest curator Rachel Perry, PhD, the program will bring the works in the exhibit into dialogue with 21st century approaches to visual storytelling.
Speakers include:
Victoria Aarons, PhD, Trinity University, editor, “The Story's Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives” (Wayne State University Press, 2025).
Tahneer Oksman, PhD, Marymount Manhattan College, author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs” (Columbia University Press, 2016), contributor, “The Story's Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives”.
Charlotte Schallié, PhD, University of Victoria, BC, Project lead and co-director, Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project, editor of the award-winning collection of graphic novels But I Live. Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
February 26, 2026
11:30 am -12:30 pm EST | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army by shining light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors, in this case, Jewish women, endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel during the liberation process. The twelve contributors to this work explore a wide range of interactions through testimonies and memoirs including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance, and in doing so, uncover a far more complicated, if not devastating, reality.
Joanna Beata Michlic, PhD, is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Education, Practice and Society, UCL and Affiliate Faculty in Gratz College's Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Antisemitism Studies Departments. A current HBI Research Associate, Michlic was founder of the HBI Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust as well as a past visiting professor in Holocaust and Contemporary history at Lund University.
Shattered Liberation, co-edited by Joanna Michlic, PhD, Nina Paulovicova, PhD, and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, PhD, is available at Purdue University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
March 18, 2026
Presentation: 5:30 - 7 pm | Reception: 7 - 8:30 pm | Heavy hors d’oeuvres and dessert will be served and dietary laws will be observed.
Brandeis University Faculty Club | Parking is available. Details will be provided closer to the date.
Join HBI to celebrate the launch of A Force for Good (Casemate IPM, March 3, 2026), Anita Wyzanski Robboy’s biography of her mother, Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth, social standing, and extraordinary determination to save countless Jewish children from annihilation during the Holocaust.
Drawing on a trove of letters and documents preserved by her mother and discovered decades later, HBI Research Associate Anita Wyzanski Robboy brings Gisela’s story vividly to life. In conversation with renowned Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Emeritus, at Brandeis University. Robboy will explore her mother’s tireless rescue work across Germany, Palestine, England, and the U.S., and reflect on what her extraordinary life teaches us about Jewish leadership, moral responsibility, and the enduring power of individual courage in times of crisis.
Books will be available for purchase at the event and will also be available at Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller on March 3, 2026.
April 23, 2026
12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
While writing the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins, 2020), Judy Batalion was drawn into the cosmopolitan society of inter-war Warsaw - a city filled with theaters, cabaret, and nightclubs with revolving dance floors - that had created these extraordinary young women. Batalion’s debut novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, shines a light on this rarely explored world through the lives of two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.
Judy Batalion is the author of several books of award-winning nonfiction including The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos and her work has appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, and many other publications.
HBI was honored to support The Last Woman of Warsaw in 2022 with an Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Award on Women, Gender and the Holocaust as well as The Light of Days with several research awards.
April 27, 2026
HBI Seminar Series
Tamar Aizenberg, HBI Scholar in Residence
12 - 1 pm EDT | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
Tamar Aizenberg’s current project is an experiential history of the grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators – the so-called third generations – in Austria, Germany, and the United States. In this talk, Aizenberg will discuss common patterns in how these grandchildren learn about their family histories from their grandparents and their parents. Focusing on how the gender of the grandparents, parents, and grandchildren influences the transmission of stories, this talk explores the ways narratives about the Holocaust and the Third Reich are told, edited, or silenced within families.
Tamar Aizenberg is a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University. Her areas of research are Holocaust memory, German Studies, and oral history. Aizenberg’s research has been supported by several fellowships, including a Fulbright Student Fellowship, a Joseph Wulf Fellowship, and an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship, and by grants from HBI, the Tauber Institute, and the Max Kade Foundation. During the 2024-25 academic year, she was a Research Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. Along with her academic work, Aizenberg serves as the Peer Review Associate at In geveb.
Past Exhibition: Fall 2025
C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage
On View October 8, 2025 - January 8, 2026
Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 8, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
C. Rose Smith, Untitled no. 90, Belmont Mansion, Nashville, TN, 2023, Gelatin Silver PrintServing as a conduit for the oppressed, my self-assertion reimagines and reinserts their existence in spaces where they were once unauthorized. Together, we speak truth to power, reckoning with and redressing a past that looms in the here and now. - C. Rose Smith
Rose Smith: A Silent Rage brings together black-and-white photographs taken on location at Southern plantations and Northern textile mills. By inhabiting the preserved living spaces of enslavers, Smith inserts their body in scenes dominated by whiteness and predatory industry. As both maker and subject, Smith reclaims and memorializes the formerly enslaved. Surveying the plantation grounds from an upper open window, seated at the head of an otherwise empty dining table set for eight, and nearly hidden among a gnarled tree, Smith critiques and subverts notions of coloniality.
Central within this series is the starched white cotton dress shirt, a “potent symbol of power and masculinity, assimilation and oppression,” and a metaphor for how “the Black body was commodified alongside cotton.” The shirt appears throughout the photographs, worn by Smith and twice draped across their arm and lap. Smith pairs precise postures and hand gestures with alterations to the dress shirt, like an upturned collar, challenging the false dichotomy between masculine and feminine expression.
C. ROSE SMITH is a visual artist examining the role of photography in constructing the layers of identity and individuality. Using fashion, site-specificity, and elements gleaned from studio portraiture, their photographs engender a subversive performance that gestures a critique of social norms. Born in Memphis, TN and raised in Atlanta, GA, Smith grew up learning the value of representation and record-keeping of images from watching their father take up the role of both photographer and videographer, and their two grandmothers assist in portrait studios.
Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including Autograph ABP (London, UK), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA), FotoFest Biennial (Houston, TX), Tempe Centre for the Arts (Tempe, AZ), and PhotoBrussels (Brussels, Belgium), among others. Their work is held in the Wedge Collection and various private collections. Smith earned an MFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. They are an Artist Scholar in Residence at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, and currently serves as the Assistant Curator of Photography at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, TN. Smith is based in Memphis, TN.
EXHIBITION EVENTS
Opening Reception
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Kniznick Gallery
Register here
Join the Women’s Studies Research Center in celebrating the opening of C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage. Meet the artist, explore their work, reflect with community members, and enjoy light refreshments.
Cross-Campus Tour with the Rose Art Museum
Wednesday, October 9, 2025
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Kniznick Gallery
Register here
Join us for an inspiring afternoon of art and exploration across Brandeis University! Begin your journey at the Kniznick Gallery with an artist-guided tour of C. Rose Smith: A Silent Rage. The exhibition brings together Smith’s arresting black-and-white photographs taken on location at Southern plantations and Northern textile mills, both sites complicit in the economy of slavery. By inhabiting the preserved living spaces of enslavers, Smith inserts their body in scenes dominated by whiteness and predatory industry. As both maker and subject, Smith reclaims and memorializes the formerly enslaved.
From there, we’ll walk together to the Rose Art Museum and discuss highlights from Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More, an exhibition of sumptuous, meditative paintings that explore Black womanhood, illuminating resilience, beauty, and autonomy. Mckinney offers a bold and transformative vision of leisure, pleasure, and the rhythmic rituals of the everyday, viewed through a female gaze. Attendees will also have the opportunity to view the Rose’s other fall exhibitions, Fred Wilson: Reflections and Fabricated Imaginaries.
C. Rose Smith in Conversation with Will C. (aka Will Chalmus)
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
6:00 p.m.
Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall
Register here
Rose Smith will be joined in conversation by educator, poet, playwright, and M.C. Will C. to discuss A Silent Rage and Smith’s practice at large.
WILL C. (aka Will Chalmus) is a dedicated facilitator of personal, communal, and professional development. He is a highly respected educator, poet, playwright, and M.C.. Will C. is currently an adjunct professor at Brandeis University for both the Provocative Art: Outside the Comfort Zone and Playback Theatre courses. Additionally, he is the director of curriculum design and a consultant for a year-long educational leadership training program, and a 3-time member of a Cambridge-based slam team. Will C. is most known for his international work with the Centre for Playback Theatre, including roles on the board of directors, various committees, and as faculty. Will C. has been instrumental in organizing three International Playback Theatre Network (IPTN) conferences, has founded several Playback Theatre companies locally, and has led programs, performances, and consultations for numerous non-profit organizations in 6 continents.
Groups interested in arranging a private tour with the artist can contact Olivia Baldwin: obaldwin@brandeis.edu.
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