pożegnanie z marią, tadeusz borowski, 1948
Pożegnanie z Marią, (the U.S. title is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the subject of our Book Cover Contest #4) , was first published in Warsaw in 1948 by Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza “Wiedza” with a cover designed by concentration camp survivor Maria Hiszpańskiej-Neumann (1917 – 1980). Hiszpańskiej-Neumann, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and a member of the resistance during the German occupation, was arrested in April 1941, and imprisoned in Radom and Pińczów. In April 1942 she was transferred to Ravensbruck, the Reich’s largest women’s camp, ultimately finding herself in the armaments factory at Neubrandenburg, one of its 70 slave-labor sub-camps. While interned she made hundreds of drawings of camp life, few of which remain. During a forced death march from the camp April 1945 just prior to liberation she escaped and after the war worked as a commercial and fine artist in a wide variety of media.
