Gerda Cohen was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1925. She came to England in 1938 with her mother to escape Nazi persecution, after both were briefly imprisoned during the Anschluss. She later studied at Cardiff School of Art and painted and sculpted for six decades, often addressing the Holocaust, inner turmoil, and contemporary conflicts in her work.
Painter, sculptor and poet Gerda Cohen was born in Vienna, Austria in 1925 to a Polish-Jewish family. Her parents ran a successful delicatessen, but her peaceful childhood was abruptly shattered by the Anschluss (German annexation of Austria) in March 1938. As a thirteen-year-old, Cohen witnessed Hitler’s arrival in Vienna; she later recalled looking out of the window at a friend’s house, listening to the radio as his car drove past – an experience she described as terrifying, when she realised he was responsible for the persecution of the Jews in Germany (Rigby 1999, p. 18). Following the Anschluss, the family faced immediate persecution. Cohen's father escaped to the Netherlands, while Cohen and her mother, Genia, were arrested in Vienna. Dressed only in their pyjamas, they were detained for three days in a crowded prison room—an experience of ‘relentless terror’ during which they were threatened with beatings if they did not remain quiet. Although they were eventually released, likely due to their Polish nationality, the situation remained precarious, as many Polish Jews were effectively rendered stateless (Memories of Vienna). The specifics of this traumatic period were later chronicled in a memoir titled Memories of Vienna, written by Cohen’s mother while in a care home in Cardiff years later.
Cohen’s escape was secured only through the extraordinary tenacity of her mother, who retrained as a milliner to gain a skill for emigration, disguised herself in grey clothing to impersonate a German woman. Defying the advice of family members, she persistently petitioned officials in the government administrative offices, until she secured a visa that included her daughter; she later distinguished herself as the ‘first mother with a child to emigrate’ (Memories of Vienna). They immigrated to England later the same year. Cohen’s father was captured in the Netherlands but managed to survive incarceration in both Westerbork transit camp and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. According to family accounts, he was being transported on a cattle train destined for Auschwitz when the war ended. While many of Cohen's relatives perished in Auschwitz, her immediate family was miraculously reunited in Cardiff, Wales in 1946.
It was in Cardiff that Cohen’s artistic potential was first recognised by a friend of her grandmother. Cohen enrolled at Cardiff School of Art, beginning a creative practice that would span six decades. Described by her son Julian as having ‘a sketchbook always at hand’, Cohen found art to be a vital therapeutic outlet, a ‘safe way’ to access the unconscious mind and process the deep-seated trauma of her displacement (Cohen 2014). Cohen eventually settled in Southampton, in England, where her husband, Leslie, taught in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southampton. During this period, the couple brought up four children, and Cohen worked as an art teacher while establishing herself as a practising artist. Her work was influenced by various twentieth-century movements, and she became known for pieces that engaged deeply with themes of human suffering. A successful exhibition of her paintings at Brook House, Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire, in the early 1960s, addressed contemporary anxieties, including the horrors of the Biafran War and the fear of nuclear conflict.
By the early 1980s, the Cohens were living in the Cotswolds in south-west England. In 1999, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of her flight from Vienna, Cohen launched the ‘Silent Voices’ Arts Trust in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Funded entirely by her share of compensation from the Austrian National Fund for the Victims of Nazism, the trust aimed to help victims of intolerance and abuse to express themselves through artistic creativity. She sought to encourage others to voice ‘unspoken feelings’, believing that shared artistic expression could help reclaim a ‘common humanity’ (Banbury Guardian 1999, p. 19). This initiative was accompanied by a significant exhibition at The Mill Arts Centre in Banbury, showcasing drawings and poetry she had created over the previous fifteen years. Her poetry from this period was partly inspired by the controversy surrounding Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna; one specific poem, written for Faber Rashed Bacchus, was displayed alongside her artwork.
In her final years, Cohen relocated to Waiheke Island, New Zealand, where she died in 2018. The Cohen family donated a portion of her archive to the University of Southampton, intended to help students understand curatorial issues in the field of Holocaust studies. In May 2025, Outreach Fellow Maddie Walch presented research on Cohen’s poetry and artwork at the Jewish Historical Society of England’s Archives, Heritage and Memory conference, focusing on the role of memory and trauma in her visual and literary work. Cohen’s work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Gerda Cohen]
Publications related to [Gerda Cohen] in the Ben Uri Library