UTW 26

Giettel Laski, born 1937 or ’38 in Warsaw, and murdered at the Majdanek death camp, Poland, 1943

Art: 1994
Media: Blue ink on pale blue etching paper
Framed, 37 inches H x 29 W [93.9 x 73.6 cm]

The wings were drawn from wings of an arctic tern at the ornithology lab, Burke Museum of Natural History, Univ. of Washington, Seattle. 

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A photo of the artist working on this drawing at the ornithology lab, Burke Museum, Seattle, was published in The Seattle Times, Sep. 8, 1994; the photo by Betty Udesen. The photo was reproduced, with the permission of The Seattle Times, in Alumnus magazine, Summer 1995 issue, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. It was published in a 3-page article, “Ken Segan: Through His Wings, Victims Transcend the Holocaust,” authored by Helen Sharp, pages 45-47.

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Born in 1937 or 1938 and raised in a non-Jewish section of Warsaw, Giettel and her family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. Giettel and other family members still alive in the spring of 1943 were captured by German-Austrian Nazi soldiers (along w/ their Lithuanian SS and Polish Police accomplices); this was during the time historically called the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April-May 1943.

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Giettel was deported by train to the Majdanek death camp with her mother, grandfather, her aunt Chana, and several other family members. The grandfather (Chana Lorber’s father), a religious man, was shot on arrival when he asked a question to a Nazi officer. Chana Lorber saw Giettel once  at the death camp; Giettel told Chana she didn’t want to die. Giettel was murdered in the gas chambers. After Giettel was murdered, her mother (a sister of Chana), having lost the will to live, joined a line to the gas chambers and perished.

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Mrs. Lorber was later sent from slave labor in Majdanek to the Auschwitz death camp complex where she found another sister who had been seized by the Germans in 1942.
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Miraculously, both sisters were alive when the Nazi soldiers, camp guards and officers retreated from Auschwitz to Germany, taking thousands of inmates on a death march with them.
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Both sisters managed to survive the death march and after a year as slave laborers at a factory in Malchow, Germany, they were liberated in 1945.

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Mrs. Lorber had an aunt who had left Warsaw for the U.S. in in the late 1920's, and the two sisters were given visas to the U.S. arranged by the International Red Cross in Sweden.

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Their aunt had corresponded with the family back in Warsaw until the war, which is how Mrs. Lorber had family photos, all taken prior to 1939. Giettel was probably a year old in the photo Mrs Lorber loaned me for my drawing. Chana's husband, who passed away several years ago, was a Jewish partisan who fought the Nazi's in the forests and countryside of Poland and Ukraine. Mrs. Lorber is now deceased.

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Watch a 2 min., 19 sec video of Segan talking about the Giettel drawing with a secondary school class in Angus, Scotland.