Photo Credit: Dan Zaitz, Courtesy of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee
A rabbi once said that every person is a universe, vast in potential and containing multitudes. If every murder extinguishes a universe, then how to comprehend the creativity cut short by mass murder? With a crime as enormous as the Holocaust, the loss is beyond measure.
The current exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee finds a human face in the catastrophe by focusing on one person—one universe whose creativity ended in genocide. For “Stitching History from the Holocaust” (on display through Feb. 28), the fashion designs on gouache by Hedwig Strnad, a successful dressmaker in pre-war Prague, have finally been fabricated into jackets and belted dresses and displayed on mannequins in the museum’s gallery space.
Strnad’s gouache panels, and the story accompanying them, have been familiar to visitors of the Jewish Museum since the permanent Holocaust exhibition opened in 2008. A 1939 letter from her husband, Paul, handwritten in English and addressed to relatives in Milwaukee, has been on display alongside Hedwig’s Paris couture-style designs for women’s ensembles. “You may imagine we have a great interest in leaving Europe,” Paul wrote, parsing words carefully to avoid arousing the Nazi censors who may have been reading his mail. Paul had been dismissed from his bank because he was Jewish; Hedwig feared the Nazis would close her dress shop. Paul asked his cousin Alvin to secure a visa for his wife on the strength of her fashion sketches. But America’s borders were tightly shut as the Nazis prepared the machinery of extermination. The Strnads were among the millions who perished before war’s end.
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And so there is something not merely sweet but bittersweet in those vintage dresses mounted on their eyeless white mannequins like ghosts in a spectral department store whose walls are covered with blown-up images of Czech streets. Hedwig’s designs were meant for the modern woman of 1939, shapely and feminine but practical, uncorseted and comfortable, trim-waisted and showing legs. They would have been as fashionable in New York and Hollywood as in Paris and Prague; some of the patterns look contemporary even today. Strnad might never have become a star on the international fashion runway, but looked forward to a long career ahead in Prague had the Nazis not arrived.
The Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s costume shop, under Director Mary Folino and First Hand Jessica Jaeger, executed Strnad’s designs for the exhibit. The Rep’s team used fabric similar to materials available to Strnad, the zippers are authentic and the patterns were silkscreened by Margaret Hasek-Guy. The only break with 1939, invisible to the observer, was the use of synthetic thread. On the lining of each dress, a label reads “Hedy Original.” She was known as Hedy to family and friends, but no one knows whether she included such labels on her dresses. None of her work, other than those gouache panels, has survived.
“Stitching History from the Holocaust” is less a fashion show than a meditation on loss. For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
