Czesława Kwoka

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 12th of March 1943, Czesława Kwoka died at Auschwitz. She was a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl, killed during the genocide of Poles that Nazi Germany carried out in occupied Poland. A photograph of her survives from the camp, taken under circumstances she could not refuse and never meant to outlast the war. What forced a fourteen-year-old girl from a Polish village into Auschwitz in the first place? Who took that photograph, and why does it still exist when so much else from the camp was destroyed? And what really happened to her there, given that the record of her death does not tell the full story?

• 2. Village to Auschwitz

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  Wólka Złojecka was Kwoka's home, a small village in Poland. She was born there to Roman Catholic parents: her mother Katarzyna, whose maiden name was Matwiejczuk, and her father Paweł.

  On the 13th of December 1942, she and her mother were deported from that village. They were moved first through a resettlement camp at Zamość, in the General Government territory, before being sent on to Auschwitz. The operation forcing them out was called Operation Zamość. It had launched the previous month to clear land in eastern Europe for German settlers, a goal the occupiers described as creating Lebensraum. At the camp, Kwoka was assigned prisoner number 26947; her mother, deported alongside her, became prisoner number 26946.

  Kwoka was one of roughly 230,000 children and young people under eighteen among the 1,300,000 people deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. Most of them arrived, like her, together with family members swept up in operations the Nazi regime carried out against whole ethnic or social groups. Only slightly more than 20,000 of these young deportees, including 11,000 recorded at the time as "Gypsies," were ever formally entered into the camp's registers. No more than 650 of them lived to see liberation in 1945.

  Those entered into the registers did not just receive a number; many, Kwoka included, were also made to stand before a camera.

• 3. The Identity Photographs

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  Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish inmate in his twenties, known at the camp as prisoner number 3444. He had trained as a portrait photographer at his aunt's studio before the 1939 German invasion of Poland. Ordered by his captors to photograph fellow prisoners, he worked under direct threat if he refused. He and the other assigned prisoners captured each inmate in three poses, "from the front and from each side." Kwoka became one of an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people whose identity pictures Brasse took at Auschwitz-Birkenau under this same duress.

  Bronislaw Jureczek, a fellow inmate who worked in the darkroom, helped Brasse rescue some of the photographs afterward. Camp policy had required that all such images and their negatives be destroyed. This rescue made Brasse well known later, remembered in some accounts simply as "the famous photographer of Auschwitz." In The Portraitist, a 2005 documentary about his life, he recounted his photographs of Kwoka specifically.

  Within months of standing before his camera, both Kwoka and her mother would be dead.

• 4. A Falsified Death

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  On the 18th of February 1943, Kwoka's mother died at the camp. Less than a month afterward, Kwoka died too; no record survives of exactly what happened to her in her final days.

  Her death certificate, issued on the 23rd of March, falsely listed the cause as cachexia brought on by intestinal catarrh. Some reports indicate the real cause was a phenol injection directly into her heart.

  The false paperwork became part of the same camp registers later used to identify her photograph.

• 5. Preserved and Remembered

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  The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum now holds some of the only surviving photographs of camp inmates, Kwoka's among them. Most such photographs, of both victims and survivors, no longer exist. Others, beyond the Museum's collection, are held at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Captions attached to these photographs were built by the Museum's Exhibition Department. They drew on camp registries and other records confiscated when the camps were liberated in 1945. Those captions record each inmate's name, prisoner number, and date and place of birth. They also list date and age at death when applicable, national or ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and date of arrival at the camp.

  Among the rescued photographs was Kwoka's identity picture. It is now displayed as part of the Museum's permanent indoor exhibit, Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners, first mounted in 1955. Kwoka's likeness also appears on the Museum Exhibition Department's official website and in some of the Museum's published albums and catalogues. A photo mural on the exhibit wall, which includes Kwoka's identity pictures, was captured in a photograph by Ryszard Domasik. A cropped version of Domasik's image, without Kwoka's photographs, appears on the Museum's official website.

  That photo mural preserves her image inside the museum walls. Her likeness has also travelled beyond them, into paintings and colorized portraits made decades after her death.

• 6. Reimagined in Art

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  Theresa Edwards wrote the verse and Lori Schreiner created the visual art for Painting Czesława Kwoka, a collaborative mixed media work inspired by Brasse's photographs. The piece was made, in the artists' own words, to "bring Czeslawa's image and voice into our lives," commemorating child victims of the Holocaust.

  On the 75th anniversary of her death, a colorized version of the photographs was published by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral. Amaral's colorized image gave Kwoka's face a version of color the original photograph never held. It was published on the 75th anniversary of her death, well over seven decades after Brasse's camera first captured it.