Cool Chicks from History

frenchhistory:

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Misia, 1897
@credits

Misia Sert (born Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska; St. Petersburg, 30 March 1872 – Paris, 15 October 1950) was a pianist of Polish descent who hosted an artistic salon in Paris. She was a patron and friend of numerous artists, for whom she regularly posed.
Her father, Cyprian Godebski (1835–1909), was a renowned Polish sculptor, and professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1870. Her mother, Zofia Servais, was the daughter of a noted Belgian cellist, Adrien-François Servais.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Misia, 1897

@credits

Misia Sert (born Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska; St. Petersburg, 30 March 1872 – Paris, 15 October 1950) was a pianist of Polish descent who hosted an artistic salon in Paris. She was a patron and friend of numerous artists, for whom she regularly posed.

Her father, Cyprian Godebski (1835–1909), was a renowned Polish sculptor, and professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1870. Her mother, Zofia Servais, was the daughter of a noted Belgian cellist, Adrien-François Servais.

"I remember telephoning Robin Hankey, the secretary at the embassy in Warsaw, and saying, ‘The war’s begun’. He said, ‘Rubbish, they’re still negotiating’. And I said, ‘Can’t you hear it?’ So I hung the telephone out the window so he could listen to the Germans invading."

— Clare Hollingworth, the first journalist to report the outbreak of World War II

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

These Jewish children are on their way to Palestine after having been released from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. The girl on the left is from Poland, the boy in the center from Latvia, and the girl on right from Hungary.

June 5, 1945

Remember Me? Photos from Kloster Inderdorf

Earlier I posted about the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s project to identify photos of children displaced by World War II. A subset of the Remember Me? photos were taken at Kloster Inderdorf, a former monastery in Bavaria near Dachau. In these photos the children hold placards with their names so that surviving family members might be able to recognize them.

The Children’s Center at Kloster Interhofen was established by the UN’s Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to house homeless non-German children after the war. Most but not all of the children at the center were Jewish. For example, Jadwiga Szulikowska was separated from her mother, a Polish forced laborer, during the bombing of Munich.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is actively looking for information about the children pictured. A complete list of the Remember Me? children can be found here.

A reunion of those who lived at Kloster Inderdorf after World War II is planned for July 2012.

Sara Gliksman describes being hidden during the Holocaust by the Fink family in Poland.

In Polish with English subtitles from the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Google Doodle celebrating the 144th anniversary of Marie Curie’s birth.

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about the Curie’s papers:

Many library collections use special equipment, such as special gloves and climate-controlled rooms, to protect the archival materials from the visitor. For the Pierre and Marie Curie collection at France’s Bibliotheque National, it’s the other way around.

That’s because after more than 100 years, much of Marie Curie’s stuff – her papers, her furniture, even her cookbooks – are still radioactive. Those who wish to open the lead-lined boxes containing her manuscripts must do so in protective clothing, and only after signing a waiver of liability.

Biologist Wiktorja S. Dembowski worked at the M. Nencki Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

1927

Forgotten Polish Exodus to Persia

“I can never erase from memory the sight of an emaciated 14-year-old girl, standing apart from a newly arrived group, holding a tiny sister tightly in her arms, the smaller so thin that the skin of her arms and legs hung loosely, as on an old man. The older girl, Irenka Wozniak, whispered as I went up to her: ‘I could manage to save only little Ewunia.’ “

Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910)

Polish Painter Olga Boznańska (1865-1940) on the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris

Circa 1907

Irena Sendler

February 10, 1910 - May 12, 2008

Rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto

As a social worker, Irena Sendler was allowed by the Nazis to visit the Warsaw Ghetto and check signs of typhus. What the Nazis didn’t know was that in addition to being a social worker, Irena was the secret head of the children’s section of Zegota (Council to Aid Jews). Between 1942 and 1943, she smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto and into hiding. For comparison, Oskar Schindler saved roughly 800 Jewish workers.

In 1943, Irena was arrested by the Gestapo. She was tortured, but she didn’t give up the names of her Zegota contacts or the hidden children. In Poland, the penalty for helping a Jew was death, a harsher sentence than elsewhere in Nazi controlled Europe. Irena was sentenced to death by firing squad, but Zegota managed to bribe a guard who left her in the woods. She spent the remainder of the war in hiding.

Irena hid lists of the children’s real names and their hiding places in jars she buried, hoping that they could soon be reunited with their families. Sadly, the majority of the parents perished in the Holocaust and never saw their children again.

Irena Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. However, her story was little known until a group of high school students created a play called Life in a Jar based on her bravery during the war. A year before her death in 2008, Irena was nominated for the 2007 Noble Peace Prize.

Although she did not win, at least her bravery was recognized during her lifetime.