PIETA IN THE CAMPS

This Pieta was done many years before WWII and yet the image reminds me of those prisoners of war in their stripped pajamas.

WIKTORIA GORNYNSKA was active in the Polish Underground during World War II and died in the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp.

She was born in 1902 in Vienna to journalists Stanisława (née Markheim) and Maksymilian.  She spent her childhood in Britain, and then returned with her parents to Vienna, where she studied at the  Kunstgewerbeschule (now the University of Applied Arts Vienna).

In 1918 she moved to Warsaw, where she continued her education at the School of Fine Arts. She lived in Berlin, later  returning to Warsaw, where she again studied at the Szkole Sztuk Pięknych (the School of Fine Arts). She worked in the medium of woodcuts.

She also wrote essays on art for both the Polish and foreign press, reviewed exhibitions and translated press texts. She gave lectures for Polish Americans on Polish Radio, the national public-service radio broadcasting organization.

Wiktoria  created over a hundred works. The collection of the National Museum in Warsaw holds 44 of her woodcut blocks and the British Museum holds 14 of her prints.

Being a multitalented woman, she was one of the first women in Poland to practice fencing and wrote articles about it for the press.

During the Nazi occupation, she was active in the underground, using the pseudonym "Leti". From 1943, she was a liaison officer at the Main Headquarters of the Home Army. After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising, she was sent to a transit camp, and from there to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where she died.