Hedy Strnad, a Jewish dressmaker in Prague in the 1930s, hoped to make it to the United States and take up her career.
But Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and Hedy would die in a concentration camp along with her husband and millions of other Jews.
In December 1939, Hedy’s husband, Paul Strnad, wrote to his cousin in Milwaukee asking for help in acquiring visas for himself and his wife to emigrate to the United States. “You may imagine we have a great interest of leaving Europe as soon as possible,” Paul wrote. He included eight sketches of Hedy’s dress designs to show she could get a job in the American apparel industry.
“We know that letter was censored – there is a swastika on the back of it,” said Ellie Gettinger, education director for Jewish Museum Milwaukee.
After years of research, more documents related to the Strnads were discovered, along with family photos. It all works to help tell the story of the Holocaust in a personal way, Gettinger said.
“We have to find new and different ways to make the experience real, to make the people real,” Gettinger said.
The letter and sketches were found in storage by relatives in 1997 and donated to the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, which asked the Milwaukee Repertory Theater costume shop to bring the dresses to life.
“Stitching History From the Holocaust,” an original exhibit on loan from the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee, features the eight dresses, which will be on display in Birmingham from Jan. 7 through March 16, 2019 at UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.
“We’re really excited to bring something so unique to Birmingham,” said Thomas Bryant, executive director of the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center, a sponsor of the event. “It’s a look into the lives of two people who perished in the Holocaust, and we get a sense of what was lost. It brings them back to life. She lives on.”
Gettinger said the exhibit also gives a view into the desperation of the immigration system during the period of World War II as Jews tried to flee Europe, but came up against strict quotas and regulations as they tried to escape to the United States.
“It shows the challenge of immigration,” Gettinger said. “What we’re grappling with is not new. Who are we keeping out and why, what are the barriers we’re putting up?”
It also raises the question of the talent that was lost in the Holocaust.
“What are the symphonies not created, the medical treatments not invented, the books not written?” Gettinger said.
An opening reception for the exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will be from 6-8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 11, at AEIVA.
Additional programs include:
- Tuesday, Jan. 22, 6 p.m., Gallery talk at AEIVA: Kristen Miller Zohn, executive director of the Costume Society of America, will speak on "European Jewish Fashions in the 30s and 40s: How the Jewish Fashion Industry Was Extinguished by the Nazis and Struggled to Return to Prominence After the War.”
- Tuesday, Feb. 5, noon, Gallery talk at AEIVA: Jonathan Wiesen, Ph.D., incoming chair of the UAB CAS Department of History, will speak on “The Holocaust in Czechoslovakia” at AEIVA.
- Sunday, Feb. 17, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., Red Mountain Theatre Company will present two performances of “A Stitch in Time,” a one-act play by Susan Westfall based on Hedy’s story, at UAB’s Alys Stephens Center.
- Tuesday, March 5, 6 p.m., Gallery talk at AEIVA: Janek Wasserman, Ph.D., history professor at UA, will speak on “Immigration Then and Now.”
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