Born: 1927 Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)
Died: 2018 Hereford, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1946
Other name/s: Edith Hofmann
Biography
Artist and writer Edith Birkin (née Hofmann) was born into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on 13 November 1927. Her older sister moved to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1939 to learn English as an au pair; however, the rest of the family remained in Prague. In 1941, with her parents, she was deported aged 14 to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Her parents perished within a year. In 1944, after the ghetto was liquidated, she was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. She subsequently survived a death march to Flossenbürg camp in Germany and was eventually liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Returning to Prague she discovered that none of her family had survived. Birkin transcribed her experiences shortly after liberation; these were finally published in 2001 in the form of a novel Unshed Tears, under her maiden name.
At the end of January 1946 she travelled from Prague to London, then via Liverpool and Scotland to Northern Ireland to join her sister. In Londonderry, she attended secondary school to make up the education she had lost in the Holocaust. During the school holidays and weekends, she mixed with fellow Jewish child refugees, finding a sense of community in their shared experiences. After several years in Londonderry she moved to Brixton, south London, living with a Jewish family and undertaking teacher training, yearning for financial independence. Though the people with whom she lodged treated her as family, she still felt loneliness and isolation, after the terrible losses she experienced during the Holocaust. After completing her training, she secured a post in Hendon, north London, and moved to Golders Green, an area with a significant Jewish community. In 1950, she began teaching locally at a school in Edgware where she remained for 11 years and where she met her husband, whom she married in 1962 and with whom she adopted two sons and a daughter. During the 1950s Birkin became a naturalised British subject. Following her marriage, she suffered a nervous breakdown, after which she never fully returned to teaching, only taking on supply roles.
Birkin began painting in 1971 after attending classes, first in art history and then in painting. She was tutored by artist John Cherrington (1931-2015), with whom she formed a close friendship in London and then in Hereford. Initially, her colourful, expressionist paintings depicted 'just ordinary things', as she explained in her Life Story interview with the British Library, but gradually she began to explore her memories of the Holocaust and experiences in the death camps. In her work she focused on the experiences of the victims, rather than the action of the Nazis, stating that ‘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’. She described her work as expressing the 'sense of loneliness or isolation experienced by so many'. In the late 1970s, her husband took early retirement and the couple moved to a cottage in Hereford. In 1984 Birkin's works were displayed in the Chapel of Unity, Coventry Cathedral, arranged by a German voluntary group, 'Action Reconciliation', which worked internationally to raise consciousness of the past in tandem with a desire to create a better future; the exhibition poster is held by the Imperial War Museum, London. In 1989 Birkin presented a solo exhibition Memories of the Holocaust at the Ben Uri Art Society in Dean Street, opened by Anton Gill, author of The Journey Back from Hell, accounts of survivors post-liberation; the exhibition toured in the UK in 1994-95 marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. In 2000, her experiences were included in the audio documentary Voices of the Shoah: Remembrances of the Holocaust, produced by film maker David Notowitz and released by Rhino Records. In 2007 Birkin published a book of poems entitled The Last Goodbye, also under her maiden name. The following year her work was included in Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust, Imperial War Museum (2008), which also included works by Polish survivors, Alicia Melamed Adams and Roman Halter (both represented in the Ben Uri Collection).
Edith Birkin died in Hereford, England on 20 September 2018, at the age of 91. In the same year her work featured in Liberators: Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection, supported by a grant from the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), in whose journal Birkin's exhibitions were reviewed during her lifetime. Her work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Birmingham Museums Trust, Hereford Museum and Art Gallery, and the Imperial War Museum, London, while her art and narrative have been incorporated into Holocaust education resources produced by Ben Uri and distributed throughout the UK.
Related books
- Angela Davis, 'Belonging and ‘Unbelonging’: Jewish Refugee and Survivor Women in 1950s Britain', Women's History Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2017
- Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: the End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (London: Yale University Press, 2015)
- Antoine Capet, 'Holocaust Art at the Imperial War Museum, 1945–2009', in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen eds., Britain and the Holocaust. The Holocaust and its Contexts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Edith Hofmann, The Last Goodbye: Holocaust Paintings and Poems (London: Able Publishing, 2007)
- David Buckman, Artists in Britain Since 1945 (Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2006)
- Edith Hofmann, Unshed Tears (Mansfield: Quill, 2001)
Public collections
Related organisations
- Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR, exhibitions reviewed in the AJR journal and a grant awarded for the Ben Uri exhibition 'Liberators' in 2018)
Related web links
- AJR grant for Liberators exhibition
- BBC Hereford and Worcester interview
- Ben Uri Liberators exhibition
- British Library Learning Voices of the Holocaust
- British Library Life Stories Transcript
- Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust at Imperial War Museum
- Edith Birkin featured in learning resources on the Holocaust
- London Grid for Learning, Holocaust education resources from Ben Uri
Selected exhibitions
- Liberators: Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2018)
- Unspeakable. The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust, Imperial War Museum (2008)
- Picture Fair, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2002)
- Czech Jewish Artists from the Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1998)
- Edith Birkin: Memories of the Holocaust, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (1995), Hannover Galleries, Liverpool (1995), University of Brighton (1994)
- Picture Fair, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1993)
- Jewish Artists of the Ben Uri Collection (2nd edition), Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1994)
- Anne Frank Exhibition, City Art Gallery, Manchester (1987)
- Edith Birkin (Hofmann) Memories of the Holocaust, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1989)
- Memorial Exhibition, Birmingham Synagogue (1985)
- Edith Birkin, North Stafford Polytechnic (1985)
- Edith Birkin, Coventry Cathedral (1984)
Ben Uri collection
Edith Birkin in the Ben Uri collection
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edith Birkin]
Ben Uri library
Publications related to [Edith Birkin] in the Ben Uri Library