GURDUS, Luba (Krugman)

Nationality: American (originally Polish: immigrated to the United States, 1948, naturalized U.S. citizen, 1956). Born: Luba Krugman, Bialystok, 1 August 1914. Education: School of Applied Art, Berlin; Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, B.A. 1939; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, M.A. 1952, Ph.D. in art history 1962. Family: Married John Gurdus in 1935; one son (deceased). Career: Illustrator, Bluszcz Publications, Warsaw, 1934-36, and Yedioth Aharenot, Tel-Aviv, 1947-48; director of art research, French & Co., New York, 1956-68; art researcher and historian, Frick Art Reference Library, 1968-78. Since 1978 writer and art historian. Has held memberships in several organizations related to art and the Holocaust. Award: Louis E. Yavner Citizen award, 1986.

Publications

Memoirs

They Didn't Live to See (portfolio of lithographic reproductions). 1949.

The Death Train: A Personal Account of a Holocaust Survivor. 1978.

Poetry

Painful Echoes: Poems of the Holocaust. 1985.

Other

The Self-Portrait in French Painting from Neo-Classicism to Realism (dissertation). 1966.

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Critical Study:

Luba Krugman Gurdus: An Artist's Holocaust Remembrance (thesis) by Maureen M. Schurr, University of Louisville, 1996.

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Luba Krugman Gurdus was trained at the School of Applied Art in Berlin and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts before World War II, and she received a doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 1962. Although Gurdus's doctoral studies concentrated on French self-portraiture, her work as a writer, an artist, and a teacher was devoted almost in its entirety to the Holocaust.

Gurdus's drawings and paintings based on her experience of the Holocaust have been exhibited in both Israel and the United States and are included in the permanent collections at Yad Vashem and elsewhere. Her artwork also forms an integral part of each of her three major publications on the Holocaust. They Didn't Live to See is a portfolio of 16 lithographic reproductions, predominantly scenes in Majdanek, where Gurdus succeeded in passing among the Polish prisoners. Both the book of poetry Painful Echoes: Poems of the Holocaust and the memoir The Death Train: A Personal Account of a Holocaust Survivor interweave the author's illustrations with her text. This combination of plastic and written expression by the same artist is unusual among Holocaust testimonies. Hence, in seeking to situate Gurdus's work in the broader literature, one would tend to look in separate directions: to memoirs, especially of Jewish women from Poland (for example, Gerda Weissmann Klein or Liliana Zuker-Bujanowska), and to artwork such as the drawings of Birkenau by Halina Olomucki. The fellow Polish Jew and Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz was also an illustrator of his own literary works, although his drawings and writing are markedly different from those of Gurdus.

Gurdus's three principal publications—the portfolio, the collection of poetry, and the memoir—tell and retell her story from the vantage points of different media and genres, overlapping at some points and supplementing one another at others. They form a single, composite whole. Thus, for instance, several of the lithographs from They Didn't Live to See reappear, with variants in some cases, as illustrations in the other two books. Likewise, some episodes narrated in The Death Train are recounted in the poems of Painful Echoes, as in "The Cause of Evil Is the Jew," in which Polish looters blame the brawling that breaks out among them on the supposed corrupting influence of the money of the deported Jews. But the full force of Gurdus's testimony is best registered by setting the several versions together. In the course of the release of Gurdus and her family from their first deportation at Zwierzyniec, for example, the constraints of a personal account in the memoir cannot help but focus attention on their momentary good fortune. The greater flexibility of the lyric, however, allows Gurdus to enlarge the story by aligning her perspective with that of the immediate victims of the same scene, which she does in "Deportation to Belzec" and which concludes, " We were driven to Belzec/For the torture of the gas" (italics added). So, too, her son's view of the "death train" itself, which is crucial to the memoir, gains an important antecedent when it is conjoined to the boy's toy train in the poem "Corner" and its corresponding illustration. (See also the reproduction of the boy's own drawing.) Finally, Gurdus brings The Death Train to an abrupt end at the moment when, looking out the window with her sister, Mira, as the Russian troops enter Warsaw, they witness the scene the other family members "didn't live to see." Thus, the closing words of the memoir also serve as the title of the portfolio.

They Come and Go, the 12th lithograph in the portfolio, carries the testimony a step further by depicting Jewish women from Majdanek on the streets of Lublin following liberation. The aimlessness of the title is captured in the friezelike composition in which the women march with no goal in view. Nevertheless, neither Gurdus's work nor her life concluded on this note of purposelessness. Instead, the leading woman of the image becomes the point of departure for the culminating prospect of Painful Echoes. There, in the illustration A Dream … a similar figure in the foreground stands in close association with the barbed wire of the camps, but the group of refugee women now walk toward the rising sun, whose rays are crowned with the word Israel, in keeping with the corresponding poem, "Ode to Homeland." This more hopeful outlook marks the trajectory of Gurdus's own postwar life, which was dedicated to education, that is, a leading forth from the darkness of the Holocaust.

—Andrew Bush

See the essay on The Death Train: A Personal Account of a Holocaust Survivor.