Kazimierz and the Warsaw ghetto

In 1940 the German occupiers began to create ghettoes in many Polish towns in which the Jews were forced to live in the most overcrowded conditions. In Krakow they were driven out of the Kazimierz, today a lively artists’ district. The sketches drawn by Teofila Reich-Ranicki to record the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto are the subject of the latest exhibition at the Jewish Museum Vienna.

Kazimierz – the former Jewish district of Krakow

According to legend, it was the great love of Polish king Kazimierz Wielki (Casimir the Great) for the beautiful Jewess Estera that led to the founding of the Kazimierz in 1335. At the time it was still an island enclosed by the Vistula and its tributary the Wilga. The new city was to become the seat of a university. In 1495, the Polish king John I Albert decided to settle the Jews of Krakow in Kazimierz. This marked the start of the “oppidum iudaeorum”, the Jewish town, which was later incorporated into the city of Krakow.

From heyday to Holocaust

Between 1450 and 1550 Kazimierz was an intellectual centre and magnet for Jews from all over Europe. Traces of the city’s heyday and of the tragedy that befell the Jewish district during the Second World War are visible to this day.

The Second World War put an abrupt end to Jewish life in Kazimierz. In 1941, the Nazis erected a ghetto for 20,000 Jews in the district of Podgórze. By the time it was closed in March 1943, some 2,000 people had died in the ghetto, a further 6,000 had been transported to Płaszów concentration camp and the rest to nearby Auschwitz. Synagogues and cemeteries were desecrated, while collections and monuments to Jewish culture fell victim to the destructive rage of the German occupiers.

A new artists’ district

During the Communist era, many artists in Krakow appreciated the secluded existence and melancholy atmosphere of Kazimierz and gradually began to settle there. Today galleries and artists’ bars are a distinctive feature of the district.

Kazimierz started to become really fashionable after the fall of Communism in 1989. It has its own rhythm and offers an alternative to mainstream Krakow. The Jewish community today has 150 members.

Sketches from the Warsaw ghetto

Teofila (‘Tosia’) Langnas was born in Lodz in 1920 and met the present-day literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in Warsaw in 1939. In November 1940 they and over 400,000 other Jews were forced to resettle in the Warsaw ghetto that had been created by the Nazis. She worked there as a graphic artist. It was during this time that most of her sketches were drawn, depicting the daily horrors of the ghetto: hunger, terror, the fight for survival and deportation. She is self-taught and her style resembles that of Walter Trier, the Prague-based illustrator of many of Erich Kästner’s books. Because of the war she was unable to fulfil here dream of studying art.

She married Marcel Reich-Ranicki in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and the two of them managed to escape in February 1943, but not before they had smuggled the drawings out of the ghetto and hidden them from the Nazis.

Jewish Museum shows salvaged drawings

For more than fifty years Teofila Reich-Ranicki kept her work under lock and key. They were shown publicly for the first time in 1999 and the Jewish Museum Vienna is now taking the opportunity to present the exhibition that was originally put together by the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. Apart from drawings of starving children, begging families and brutal Nazis, the exhibition also features Erich Kästner’s book Die Lyrische Hausapotheke (English: The Lyrical Medicine Chest), which she copied down and illustrated in the ghetto for her husband.

The accompanying brochure contains extracts from Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s autobiography Mein Leben (English title: The Author Himself), which features a full description of his experiences in the ghetto. It was particularly difficult to have an affectionate relationship there. “At any moment, even the most blissful, it was always possible that soldiers would bang or break down the door with their rifle butts.” He and Teofila are among the few survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. They are now both eighty-nine years old and live in Frankfurt.