Zupya from Auschwitz is Naomi from Lohamei Hagetaot

David Rapp

Haaretz, 19 August 2005

The testimony given by Vera Alexander at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem focused on her memories of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Visual, subjective memories, of the sort that muted and faded over the years. Alexander, a native of Slovakia, took the witness stand on June 8, 1961. Gideon Hausner, prosecutor in the trial, presented the court and the witness with an album of drawings that depicted everyday life in Auschwitz.

Alexander was asked to look at several of the drawings. She immediately identified the scene in which the women arrive at the gate of the camp, and their hair is shaven. "We ceased to be women," she dryly noted as the drawings were shown to her. Afterward, she identified the beatings with whips and the drawn out daily count-off; and also the "sport" competitions, particularly the systematic torture at the hands of the camp staff, including the kapo, who was chosen from among the prisoners. Alexander hesitated a bit when she was shown a drawing of dogs. "I never saw an SS insignia on a dog," she finally said. "But is this how it looked?" asked the prosecutor, referring to the general picture arising from the drawing. "It was like that, but even worse," she replied.

After her testimony concluded, the presiding judge asked the prosecutor who drew this evidence from the camp.

"We received it from Mr. Dobkin of the Jewish Agency executive," said Hausner. "It was drawn by a female prisoner whom we have not succeeded in locating." The album was introduced as evidence, labeled as T/1346, and the trial went on.

Prisoner No. 48035

The identity of the anonymous artist remained unknown for many years. She died without knowing what happened to the album she created immediately after the war, even though she noted in an autobiographical essay that she knew it had served as evidence in the Eichmann trial. It seems that she did not know how to work her way through the system in order to retrieve her album.

It is unclear if representatives of the state made any effort to ascertain what happened to the artist, even though her name - Zupya Rosenstrauch - appeared at the bottom of every drawing, along with the number 48035, which was tattooed on her arm by the Nazis.

The album, containing 20 drawings in watercolor and ink on paper, was sent after the Eichmann trial to the storerooms of the Israel State Archive, and about 10 years ago was transferred to the Yad Vashem museum. It was placed in a glass display case in the permanent exhibition.

At the museum, the album was seen by Yehudit Shendar, who became the senior curator of art at Yad Vashem in 1997. "As part of my study of the large collection of artwork, I was attracted to the album of drawings," relates Shendar. "I pulled out the portfolio of the work that was in the Yad Vashem archive. There I found a high-quality facsimile of the drawings in the album, which was prepared at the time of the Eichmann trial, but little other information. It said that the album was prepared after the war, meaning that the artist obviously survived the atrocities of the camp. I decided that I had to find Zupya Rosenstrauch."

Shendar went to an archive in Germany that specialized in information about missing persons from World War II. Rosenstrauch's name appeared in the archive, with notation of her year of birth (1920) and details of her place of residence after the war (Warsaw). The source of the information was the Polish Jewish Council. A request for information from the current director of the council in Warsaw, as well as from the Israel State Archive and the archive of the Israel Police produced little new information.

"We learned that Eliyahu Dobkin, a senior Jewish Agency official who is mentioned by Hausner as the source of the album, received the artwork during one of his visits to Europe as an Agency emissary. We did not unearth any information that might have led us to Zupya."

That information was eventually gleaned from an Auschwitz journal - a precise report drafted each day by the camp directorate - which is at the Auschwitz museum. On July 1, 1943, the journal notes that 805 Jews were collected for transfer to Auschwitz from the Majdanek camp - 222 men and 583 women. The numbers issued to the new prisoners are notated in the journal, including the number burned onto Rosenstrauch's arm.

The journal also notes that that same day, a prisoner attempted to escape from the train. One of the more startling drawings made by Rosenstrauch depicts such an escape attempt.

"Evidently, it was a non-Jewish Pole," says Shendar. "Most of the Jews felt there was no reason to try to escape. They would in any case be captured by the locals and murdered. A Pole at least had a chance." The drawing shows thick smoke billowing above the train cars, and the form of the escaped prisoner falling down. Behind him is a soldier aiming his weapon at the escapee.

Critical labor

A letter that accompanied the journal entry, which was sent at Shendar's request from Auschwitz to Yad Vashem, noted that Rosenstrauch was assigned to the construction unit in the women's camp. "She was a professional draftswoman, and the Germans considered her critical labor for the continued construction of the camp," says Shendar. The drawing in which Rosenstrauch depicted the women's infirmary in the camp finds a parallel in her own biography: Another document that arrived from Auschwitz concerns one of her visits to the infirmary. In fact, the atmosphere of "normal" business as usual that arises from the document is shocking. "Rosenstrauch was sent on August 5, 1944 to a doctor, on suspicion that she had developed diphtheria," says Shendar. "The doctors sent her for tests."

The camp could not afford to lose a gifted laborer, even one who was Jewish. Although Shendar received a copy of the detailed results of the tests Rosenstrauch underwent in the summer of 1944, she still did not know the fate of the patient.

In early 2003, a man named Morris Vishograd arrived at Yad Vashem, an artist and graphic artist living in New York. In conversation with him, it developed that after the war, he worked for the Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw. "We asked Vishograd if by chance he had heard of Zupya," says Shendar, "and he said that he had personally met her, and that in a letter she sent him in 1946, Zupya mentioned that she was waiting to receive papers that would permit her immigration to Uruguay." Shendar decided to sound a public appeal. Through Yaron Enosh's radio program on Reshet Bet, she asked for the listeners' help in locating Zupya, but no new information developed.

She is not in Uruguay

In the end, the mystery was solved in the same way it began: through the viewing of an item displayed in the museum. "In April, I received a call from a woman named Liliana Feldman, who had seen Rosenstrauch album on display in the new Yad Vashem art museum," says Shendar. Feldman met Rosenstrauch after the war. She said that in the morning, Rosenstrauch used to work for the Communist Party in Poland, creating posters that venerated Lenin and Stalin, and in the evening drew her memories of the camps for the Polish Jewish Council."

Yad Vashem officials attempted to find Rosenstrauch's address in Uruguay, Feldman was told. "Why Uruguay?" asked her old acquaintance. "She immigrated to Israel and joined Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. When she got married, she took her husband's family name, Yudkovsky, and even changed her given name to Naomi."

A quick search on the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot Web site provided information about one Naomi Yudkovsky, an active member of the kibbutz.

She died in 1996

"Yudkovsky had taken part in committees that decided on the conferring of Righteous Gentile status at Yad Vashem," said Shendar. "The woman, who visited here more than once, died in 1996, the same year that her most important work of art arrived at our museum, without her ever knowing what happened to it."

Late last month, the two sons of Naomi Yudkovsky - aka Zupya Rosenstrauch - visited Yad Vashem. Michael (Mickey) Yudkovsky and Yigal Dekel Yudkovsky live with their families in Tel Aviv. They came to Jerusalem to see the album their mother drew. The two were already familiar with the album from faded photographs in their home.

"Hanging in the kibbutz guestrooms are landscapes my mother drew late in life," relates Mickey Yudkovsky. "The contrast between the terror in the drawings displayed in Yad Vashem and the pastoral nature of the landscapes is incredible."

"Their big surprise was seeing that the drawings were done in color," says Shendar and admits there is something symbolic to this. "A great deal of our visual perception of the Holocaust is distorted," she adds. First because we receive most of the data from the perspective of the brutal soldier. Second, since the technology dictated documentation in black and white." In our consciousness, the memory of the Holocaust is drawn in monochromatic shades.

"We found out that Michael Yudkovsky, who returned last year from a trip to Poland in search of his roots and who then decided to try to find the album drawn by his mother, also made an appeal on Yaron Enosh's program," says Shendar. "The fact that we were searching for each other along parallel lines is sad."

The glass display case in which Feldman saw the album drawn by her old acquaintance from Warsaw is not the same display case in which Shendar saw it. This past April, the all-new Yad Vashem museum was opened to the public. Overshadowed by the festive event, the opening of the art museum was slightly delayed. Shendar and her staff had labored in the past few years on its establishment. Appearing in the art museum's permanent exhibit are 167 works from the collection. About 300 other works are displayed in the main Yad Vashem museum, but this is only a fragment of the immense collection, which contains approximately 10,000 works of art, most of which are in warehouses.

"The art museum at Yad Vashem focuses on works created by Jews and non-Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis," says Shendar. "Most of it consists of paintings, since barely any three-dimensional works survived. Photographs belong to either Yad Vashem's historical collection or the artifacts collection, not to us."

Hundreds of works are on display on Yad Vashem's Web site. "We are in no rush to put all of the works on the Internet, out of a concern that improper use might be made of them," says Shendar. "These are sensitive materials. On the one hand, they are visual testimony, and on the other hand, they reflect artistic freedom that existed even in the most difficult periods."

Of the thousands of items on display, there are quite a few in which the identity of the artist and his or her fate is unknown, or whose biography is incomplete. One example of this is the story of the Sheft family. After Emil Sheft, a bank manager in Warsaw, was shot to death in the street by the Germans, his wife Marila and daughter Inca moved into the ghetto. A Polish woman named Kazimira Lukashik risked her life in 1942, smuggling the mother and daughter and another girl into her home, which was outside the ghetto. An informer revealed it to the Nazis, and the Gestapo raided the home. The owners of the house and the three Jewish women were saved from execution by a bribe offered to the raiders, but it was clear they could no longer stay there.

A few years ago, Shendar met Lukashik's son in Poland. He filled in some of the gaps, explaining that the three Jewish women fled to a rural area. There, as far as was known, they were killed. Among other things, they left a self-portrait painted by Marila and a portrait of her father. Among the "Pages of Testimony" that have been submitted to Yad Vashem over the years is an eyewitness account from a woman named Aliza Wurzheiser, a relative of the Sheft's, and it corroborates the story told by Lukashik. Shendar says that Yad Vashem has still not succeeded in tracking down a relative of the family, even though it is known that she lived in Israel.

Nevertheless, some of the stories do find closure. In the charcoal portraits clandestinely drawn by Alter (Arthur) Ritov in a camp in Riga, Shendar sees an antithesis to the Nazi aspiration to strip the victims of their individual uniqueness, and relate to them as forms lacking any personal worth.

Ritov hid the portraits in a garage on the camp grounds, and brought them to Israel when he immigrated in 1970. He also retained notebooks in which he briefly described the people he drew. One was Tzemach Weinrich, a butcher from Latvia, "who is immensely strong." Ritov wrote that Tzemach Weinrich was assigned the job of loading German army vehicles onto the trains sent to the front, and that he would sabotage the railcars. "Eventually they caught him in the act of sabotage, and hung him in the ghetto," Shendar says.

She and her team unearthed documentation related to Tzemach Weinrich, and even made contact with his brother's wife. The information about him is chillingly illustrated, in black and white, in the charcoal drawing secretly made by Alter Ritov, less than two years before the end of the war.