Ágnes Lukács, Sheet “ Összebújva” (Close together), in: id. „Auschwitz Nöi Tábor“ (The Auschwitz Women's Camp). 24 lithographs, ed. by the Socialist-Zionist Party Ichud / Bela Denes, Budapest 1946. With the kind permission of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, Budapest. You have to contact the museum before any other use or reproduction the image.
The 1946 portfolio of lithographs by Hungarian-Jewish artist Ágnes Lukács titled “Auschwitz Nöi Tábor” (The Auschwitz Women's Camp) includes an image of a group of women standing closely together, holding each other as if to warm or comfort one another. Those at the outside of the group try to get as close as possible to the others. The title, “Összebújva” (Close Together), listed on a sheet enclosed in the edition, further reinforces the drawing's message. The drawing is part of a series of 24 lithographs. In this series Lukács repeatedly makes use of the group motif and of specific details in order to intensify her visual narratives of forced labor, selection, hunger, violence, and death. Both her preliminary sketches made in the fall of 1945 and the stones she used to draw on are lost.
Although Lukács included this drawing in her series of images from Auschwitz, reproductions of it are often used to visualize the history of female prisoners in the satellite camps of the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. For both educators and visitors at the Neuengamme memorial, this image serves as a source for talking and learning about the conditions of imprisonment and survival experienced by female camp inmates, but it also addresses questions of solidarity and friendship under violent conditions.
Ágnes Lukács, Sheet “ Összebújva” (Close together), in: id. „Auschwitz Nöi Tábor“ (The Auschwitz Women’s Camp). 24 lithographs, ed. by the Socialist-Zionist Party Ichud / Bela Denes, Budapest 1946., edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-170.en.v1> [December 21, 2024].