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 1/2 in., [Series: 'Menschliche Hände' | 'Human Hands'], Courtesy of Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
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. Copyright, Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection. Photographer, Noam Feiner.
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.
Exhibition Press
Exhibition 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.