Who Will Draw Our History?
Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949
Presentation by Rachel Perry, PhD
March 4, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
| FreeIn this talk, art historian and curator Rachel Perry discusses ten graphic narratives of their experiences of Nazi persecution created by women immediately after liberation. Lacking photographs of what they witnessed and endured, these “first responders” used visual storytelling to counter perpetrator and liberator sources and represent maternal loss, sexual violence, forced labor, and bodily trauma—experiences rarely recorded in canonical Holocaust testimony. Drawing on archives across Europe, Israel, and the United States, this talk recovers marginalized stories that predate Art Spiegelman’s Maus by decades.
Image above: 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
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
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).
Collection of six Graphic Holocaust books. Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection. Photographer Noam Feiner
Rachel Perry is an art historian and curator specializing in the representation and memory of the Holocaust and WWII in visual culture. She teaches in the Weiss-Livnat Graduate Program in Holocaust Studies program at the University of Haifa and in the Holocaust and Human Rights program at Gratz College. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Dedalus Foundation, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Yad Vashem Institute, EHRI and CASVA, she has published widely on topics such as Yizkor books, found footage, color reproduction, exhibition histories, reenactment, graphic novels, material culture and visual testimony. Her articles have appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 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. She is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute completing a manuscript on early Holocaust graphic narratives.
This event is part of the online series Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.
The exhibition “Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949” is on view until April 30 at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery:
