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Starting from a largely overlooked memorial site in Markkleeberg near Leipzig, the artist Mandy Gehrt traces the paths of Holocaust survivor Dr. Zahava Szász Stessel to the present-day United States. At the ages of 13 and 14, Zahava Szász Stessel and her sister—Hungarian Jewish girls at the time—survived Auschwitz and the Buchenwald subcamp in Markkleeberg. After liberation, their journeys took them through Hungary, Germany, and Cyprus before they eventually settled in Israel and in New York.
Traveling to the sites of this postwar history, Mandy Gehrt photographed memorials, buildings, landscapes, and other traces of the past. These images are complemented by conversations with Zahava Szász Stessel, recollections from her book “Snow Flowers”, encounters with relatives, experts, and chance companions, as well as research in archives and literature. In this way, a cartography of memory emerges—one that does not regard memory as fixed, but understands it as a process in motion.
This publication recounts escape, new beginnings, educational paths, and self-assertion. It also asks how survivors lived on after 1945—how they learned, studied, worked, wrote, and preserved their history to prevent it from being forgotten.