There’s another impressive little exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee (JMM) through February28th of next year: Stitching History from the Holocaust. It tells the heartbreaking story of a German-speaking Czech Jew named Hedvika “Hedy” Strnad & her husband Paul. At age 39, Hedy ran a successful dressmaking shop in Aussig (Usti nad Labem), Czechoslovakia. But it was 1938.
The Nazis came & swallowed the Sudetenland, with ignominious Allied blessing, destroying the Strnads & their whole Jewish community within a few terrifying years. Perhaps worse, our government did nothing to help the Strnads when they desperately sought refuge in the USA. Paul's typed letters to cousin Alvin Strnad in Milwaukee hang on the gallery walls like silent screams.
An envelope from abroad bears the dreaded SS logo, an occupying bureaucratic censor’s stamp of approval. The so-called affidavit of necessity required by Uncle Sam didn’t suffice to save the couple. They were deemed too average to deserve a precious US visa.
But this story has a sort of happy ending. In a sense, the exhibit itself is an act of redemption, a gesture of regret on behalf of a talented woman, a cultured Czech citizen who died beside her husband in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1942. The JMM worked with the costume shop of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in bringing several of Hedy Strnad’s designs to life.
These artists of cloth took great pains to find or create just the right fabrics, prints, colors & other details. The seamstresses' results are beautifully draped on forms: a pair of modest blue & white dresses as well as a fine modern lady’s well-shouldered grey suit. The Old World patterns that led to these retro-garments were probably illustrated by Hedy herself. Meant to be the Strnads ticket to escape the coming Holocaust, they at least inspired a moving labor of love 75 years later.
Prof. Beverly Gordon, a fashion & textile historian at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), gave a companion talk called “Hedvika Strnad & Czech Fashions of the 1930s” at a JMM luncheon on December 4th. She suggested that, given a history marked by medieval pogroms, the 1745 expulsion from Prague & the anti-semitic horror shows inflicted by central European fascists, Czech Jews could never feel entirely secure. No wonder the paranoid literary genius of Franz Kafka sprang from Prague Jewry.
Nazi documents show that 92,000 remaining Jews were deported to concentration camps & walled ghettos from Bohemia & Moravia by the Germans in 1941-42. The vast majority died during the war, either by brutal murder or criminal neglect. A lucky few (e.g. pre-war Kindertransports to England) managed to escape the genocide. The Strnads too tried hard in 1939.
Unfortunately, like many others abandoned by indifferent foreign authorities, Hedy & Paul didn’t manage to get a golden ticket to freedom. Official US records show that thousands of American refugee visas, which might have been issued to European Jews in 1939, instead went unused, making Adolf Hitler's plans for a Final Solution feasible. Imagine what a vibrant would-be immigrant like Hedy Strnad might have added to our country & its culture.
It makes me wonder about those Central American refugees that our federal government deports to dangerous places. How many more Hedy Strnads must die before we learn compassion for endangered strangers?
NOTE: This exhibit provided the occasion for a catalog about the Strnads & their plight, available for purchase on the JMM website: www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org
[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]
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