The Heart of the City That Once Was

The poster They Fought For Our Honour and Freedom designed by Judyta Sobel in 1948 was submitted to the art competition organised by the Central Committee of Polish Jews and the Jewish Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. At the time, Sobel was a student of Władysław Strzemiński at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. In line with the competition guidelines, the artist placed the slogan on the poster and submitted the work anonymously – marked by an identifying emblem reading “Atom.” The design did not win the appreciation of the jury, and since the announcement of the results, the unsigned work had been stored in the JHI as a poster by an unidentified author. 

While working on last year’s temporary exhibition in the JHI, titled Monuments to Resistance: Art on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943–1956), I started to look for more detailed information on the art competitions. In the midst of searching the archives, I would time and time again find unsealed letters attached by the participants to their works in order to identify them once the contest was closed. Seventy-five years later, the envelopes were opened for the first time, revealing the names of the authors behind over twenty poster designs in the JHI collection. As it turned out, some of the submissions were produced by well-known and esteemed artists, such as Andrzej Wajda, Eryk Lipiński, Ignacy Witz, or aforementioned Judyta Sobel. 

The poster by Judyta Sobel immediately drew my attention, it stood out from other designs. The art competitions had a clear propagandist purpose. Their premise was to shape a very particular perception of the uprising, first and foremost to emphasise the heroism and bravery of the fighters. Thus, most artists would refer to the symbolism of struggle, resistance, and heroic death. Sobel chose a different approach. Contrary to other participants, she chose to deviate from figurative composition. She did not depict unambiguous gestures of victory, raised rifles and grenades, flames, fierce battle, the fallen and their matzevot. Her poster did not meet the propaganda goal of the contest, which was most likely why it was dismissed. Among the designs I have seen, Sobel’s submission was the only one to include abstract elements. The crooked black and white lines in the foreground lend themselves to various interpretations. Is it an outline of a city? A damaged gun? A crack? The lines traverse a torn Star of David, almost falling apart. The theme of disintegration is also carried in the emblem – the “Atom”, given to the work just three years after the end of World War II and the detonation of the nuclear bomb. 

Why did Sobel decide to present the theme in a muted, non-figurative way? Perhaps she drew the abstract lines under the influence of Unism, a trend started by her erstwhile teacher, Professor Władysław Strzemiński. Or perhaps she had other, more personal motivations? 

Judyta Sobel, like many other Jewish poster designers, soon after the war registered as a Survivor with the Central Jewish Committee in Poland. Her registration card includes a short entry on how she survived the war. Most of the registered poster designers had been repatriated from the USSR. However, Judyta had a different experience, as she – probably together with her mother Salomea – had gone into hiding in the woods and later used “Aryan papers” in Lviv. In 1946, she and her parents moved into the Auerbach tenement house in Łódź, which was also the seat of the Dos Naye Lebn newspaper and the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists, both associated with the Central Committee of Polish Jews. Her father, engineer Herman Sobel, personally cooperated with the Committee. He was one of the people who helped discover the most important testimony from the Holocaust, the first part of the Ringelblum Archive. In 1946, he was commissioned by the Committee to produce site plans, carry out technical measurements, and lead excavation works in 68 Nowolipki Street in order to find buried boxes with priceless documents. 

Four years later, soon after her father’s death, Judyta left for Israel, taking with her the works entrusted to her by Strzemiński, forming part of his cycle To My Friends the Jews. In 1956, before migrating to the United States, she handed over his famous collages to the Yad Vashem Institute. She worked her entire life, specialising in colourful landscapes and still lifes, shying away from themes associated with war. She died in 2012, aged 88. We did not have the opportunity to ask her about the poster design stored in JHI which she submitted as a student to the competition commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The call for submissions for the competition organised to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is available at.

In our digital repository, the object can be viewed in the highest quality.

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