UTW 47

No one came to save Anna Plockier

Art: 2002
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil
Framed, 24.5 inches H x 42 W

Born in 1915, Anna Plockier was a painting graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. She and her husband Marek were shot to death by Ukranian SS soldiers on Nov. 27, 1941 in Borysław.

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Anna Plockier was a correspondent friend of the (now-posthumously famous) Polish Jewish visual artist and playwright (Bruno Schulz). I don't know if any of Anna Plockier's art, nor if any of the letters she wrote Schulz survive. The text of 2 letters that Bruno Schulz wrote to her are published in The Letters & Drawings of Bruno Schulz (pub. by Harper & Row, 1988).

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 Schulz lived in what is described as a "backwater" city, Drohobycz.  It has been in Ukraine since the end of WWII; before then it was part of Poland). Schulz had stayed in contact with artistic and other “intelligentsia” friends in Warsaw and elsewhere via correspondence.

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Schulz was shot to death, in the head, at point- blank range by a Nazi officer, reportedly a Gestapo officer named Guenther, on a street in Drohobycz on the same day the Nazi ghetto for Jews was "liquidated" by the occupying Nazi armed forces in 1942. The liquidation was called Black Thursday.  An account was written by a fellow townsman, a Jewish man named Tzydor Friedman, who survived the genocide with false papers naming him as Tadeusz Lubowiecki. (His account appears in the notes in The Letters & Writings of Bruno Schulz).

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The street with shops where Schulz was standing (when he was murdered) is portrayed; and Schulz, separately, are both portrayed in a small drawing section, in black ink, in the upper left of UTW 42: Shoah Dreams, the largest drawing of the Under the Wings series.

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The photo of Plockier used for my drawing appears in the book

Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, edited by Jerzy Ficowski (Harper & Row, NY, 1998). 

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The gravestones I depicted were inspired by photos in Time of Stones, photos by Monika Krajewska (Interpress, Warsaw, 1983).

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The peach-faced love bird, lower left, was a pet belonging to D’vorah Kost, a friend of the artist. The bird agreed to be drawn in the drawing while Ms. Kost was out-of-town and Segan was pet sitting the bird for Ms. Kost. The cockatiel, seen at upper left, was a pet bird belonging to the artist.

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The boat with two people was inspired by a black & white photo by Gustav Hansson of Sweden, seen in the book U.S. Camera Annual 1952 (published by U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., NY.)

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Ficowski died on May 9, 2006 at age 81. Tragically, and absurdly, neither the Forward, then a Jewish weekly (formerly called The Forward, and for decades of the 20th century known as the Forverts (Yiddish), published in New York;  nor The New York York Times published an obit. Ficowski was the author of over 25 books of prose, poetry and was considered the foremost expert and biographer of Bruno Schulz’s life and creative work.