Other name Edith Hofmann
Born Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic)
Died Hereford, England
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Edith Birkin (née Hoffmann) was born into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) on 13 November 1927. As a girl of 14, she entered the Lodz ghetto in Poland and three years later was sent to Auschwitz, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres. She survived a death march to Flossenbürg Camp and was finally liberated from Bergen-Belsen Camp in 1945. On her return to Prague, she discovered that none of her family had survived. Shortly after liberation, she recorded her experiences, later published in 2001 in the form of a novel, 'Unshed Tears', under her maiden name, Edith Hofmann.
In 1946 she settled in England, where she became a teacher, adopted three children and took classes in the History of Art and in Fine Art. Her painting focused on her memories and experiences of the Holocaust and she also published a book of poems, entitled 'The Last Goodbye'. Her work was exhibited at venues including Coventry Cathedral (1984), North Stafford Polytechnic (1984) and as part of the Anne Frank exhibition in Manchester in 1987. She held a solo exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery entitled 'Memories of the Holocaust' in 1989, and her work has also been included in group shows including Czech Jewish Artists from the Ben Uri Collection (1998) and Liberators: Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection (2018). Edith Birkin moved to Herefordshire in the 1980s, where she died on 20 September 2018 at the age of 90. Her work is in UK collections including Birmingham Museums Trust, Hereford Museum and Art Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.
Date 1987
Object type painting
Medium acrylic on canvas
Materials and techniques acrylic (medium) canvas (support)
Unframed 69.1 x 52.2 cm
Framed 77.5 x 60.8 cm
Signed and dated (lower right): E. Hofmann 1989
Acquisition presented by the artist 1989
Accession number 1989-1
Display status not on display
Holocaust survivor Edith Birkin has said of her painting: 'I evolved a pictorial language that enabled me to put my visions on canvas. It wasn't so much the cruelty or physical suffering that I wanted to record. Most of all, I wanted to show what it felt like to be a human being, in the starved, emaciated strange-looking body, forever being separated from loved ones.'
Auschwitz | blue | concentration camp | ghetto | Holocaust | incarceration | liberation | painting
1989
Memories of the Holocaust: Edith Birkin (Hofmann)
Ben Uri Art Society
2018
Liberators: Extraordinary women artists from the Ben Uri Collection
Ben Uri Gallery
Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in Camden (London: The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2013), p.7 (illus. included); Walter Schwab and Julia Weiner, eds., Jewish Artists: the Ben Uri Collection - Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Sculpture (London: Ben Uri Art Society in association with Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1994), p. 117.
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