Explore through artist
Edith Birkin
'While the script was gathering dust, the memories of the squalor of the Ghetto, the chimneys and red skies of Auschwitz, the struggle through the snow of the Death March and walking corpses of Belsen never left me.'
A Camp of Twins - Auschwitz
1980 - 1982
The Death Cart - Lodz Ghetto
1980-1982
The Last Gasp - Gas Chamber
1980 - 1982
Liberation Day
1980 - 1982
Edith Birkin (nee Hofmann), born 13 November 1927 in Prague, was sent with her family to Lodz Ghetto, Nazi-occupied Poland, in 1941.
Her parents died in the ghetto within a year and Edith was left on her own. With the Russian advance into Poland in 1944, the Lodz Ghetto was liquidated and the remaining population sent to Auschwitz. On arrival there Edith was selected for slave labour and sent to a camp in eastern Germany, where she worked in an underground munitions factory.
In January 1945, with the Russians now advancing into Germany, the slave labourers were sent on a death march across Germany, to Bavaria, where they were loaded onto cattle trucks. After a week in crowded conditions Edith arrived in Belsen 15 March 1945 and was liberated a month later.
Edith returned to Prague only to find that none of her family and friends had survived. In 1946, she settled in England and became a teacher.