Introduction
In the Malmö Art Museum collection, there is a small drawing on paper by Maja Berezowska. It was made in 1942 when the Polish artist was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, near a village north of Berlin. Berezowska had been arrested earlier that year in her Warsaw flat and interned by the Gestapo in the Pawiak prison, before being transported to Ravensbrück in May.1 Berezowska’s arrest was connected to her caricatures of Hitler, published in 1934 in the French journal ICI Paris.2 Those drawings had accompanied a satirical article and mocked the Führer as a failed lover, depicting him in compromising poses. The drawings’ publication had caused an international scandal, and though Berezowska avoided retaliation at that time, she paid the price years later. The drawing from the Art Museum collection is a watercolor, depicting two women sitting next to each other, looking sideways in the same direction [fig. 1]. At first glance, the work is a classic portrait, made to express affection for the women it depicts and to 1 2
See Małgorzata Czyńska, Berezowska: Nagość dla wszystkich (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2018), e-book, chap. “Pawiak.” Jean Mezerette, “Hitler intime et les amours du süsse Adolf,” il. Maja Berezowska, ICI Paris, no. 4 (1934).
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