01 Work, The art of War, Edith Birkin's The Death Cart - Lodz Ghettord, with Footnotes

Edith Birkin

The Death Cart - Lodz Ghettord

Acrylic

Height 914 mm, Width 712 mm

 Imperial War Museums

People carry bodies wrapped in white sheets to a horse-drawn cart in a city street. Other people look on from windows and doorways, their faces largely skull-like in appearance.

The Lódz Ghetto was the second-largest ghetto established for Jews and Roma in German-occupied Poland after the Warsaw ghetto. Situated in the town of Lódz and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and the German Army. Because of its remarkable productivity the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated. More on this painting

Edith Birkin (née Hofmann; 13 November 1927 – 20 September 2018) was a Jewish artist and writer born in Prague, who spent her later years in Britain. She was a survivor of the Holocaust.

At aged 14, she was sent with her family to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Her parents died within their first year there. When the Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, Birkin was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz where she spent the rest of her time there working in an underground munitions factory.

Birkin was liberated from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, having survived a death march to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. She returned to Prague at the end of the war to discover that none of her family had survived.

"It was really I think the worst time of the war. Although we were free and liberated, it was the very worst time because we realised, or I realised that nobody was going to come back, and that life is never going to be the same, and what I hoped for would happen after the war is never going to happen. The hope was gone."

Birkin wrote down her experiences shortly after liberation and in 2001 they were published in the form of a novel, Unshed Tears under her maiden name, Edith Hofmann. More on Edith Birkin

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