January 27th 2023 will be the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in 1945. It is marked every year by Holocaust Memorial Day; a day when we remember the millions of people who were murdered during the Holocaust under Nazi persecution, as well as the victims of other genocides around the world.
In the Out of the Crate exhibition, in gallery 12, there is a sculpture bust of a young woman. Created in 1912 and bought by the gallery in 1931, we knew nothing about her and little more about the sculptor, Maria Petrie. Maria Petrie was born Maria Zimmern in 1887 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. You can find out what else we found out about her in an earlier blog post. But who the young sitter was, we had no idea. Perhaps it was just some anonymous model and we would never know.
Portrait Study (1912) by Maria Petrie © Manchester Art Gallery
But now we do know who she is, and it turns out that her story is a poignant one.
It was only when members of the Zimmern and Petrie families contacted us about Maria that we found out more. A photo of the sculpture in a family album revealed the sitter’s name to be Hilda Lust. According to Maria Petrie’s own writings, “When I exhibited a bronze bust in Manchester, one which dated back to Frankfurt and was the portrait of a beautiful Jewish school friend who fell victim to Hitler, the gallery bought it.”
That wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was enough to start. Knowing that the school friend must have been born in Frankfurt at around the same time as Maria, and that she died during the Holocaust, an obvious place to search was the Holocaust Victims and Survivors Database at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It returned one result.
It was on a list of names of Jews deported from Luxembourg. Born in Frankfurt in 1890, Hilde was now married. Her name was Hilde Leonie Stilgebauer (nee Lust). She was, according to another form, without occupation. It certainly fits the few facts we have and, although the evidence is only circumstantial, it is compelling. Could this be our sitter?
Some genealogical research revealed that Hilde Leonie Irma Lust was born on 19th January 1890 to Henri Franz Lust and Nellie Sarah Seligman. She had one sister, Valerie Frida Lust, born in 1893. They lived in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse-Nassau, Germany. The right place and time to be Maria’s school friend.
Frankfurt am Main circa 1890 source
From 1907 to 1910, Maria Zimmern studied sculpture in Paris under the sculptor Aristide Maillol (whose work Pomona you can see in gallery 10). Returning to Frankfurt, it was around this time that she created the portrait bust of her ‘beautiful school friend’, Hilde.
(L) Maria Petrie (nee Zimmern), Paris 1910 (R) photos of Hilde Lust Portrait Study (1912) Reproduced with the kind permission of Maria Petrie’s, nee Zimmern, family and descendants.
On 17th November 1917, Hilde married Bernard Adolph Otto Stilgebauer. By this time, Maria Zimmern had married Eric Petrie and was now living in Edinburgh.
At some point Hilde and her husband Bernard moved to Luxembourg. The Germans occupied Luxembourg in May 1940 and formally annexed it in August 1942. Over 3,500 Jews lived in there. In 1941, restrictions required that all Jews wore a badge; a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” on it. Many Jews fled to France. By now, only 750 Jews remained in Luxembourg. 80 percent of them were over the age of 50, including Hilde, now aged 52. By October, the Nazis rounded up the remaining Jews and imprisoned them in Funfbrunnen Camp, an abandoned monastery. Between October 1941 and September 1943, they deported 674 Jews.
According to documentation, on the 28th July 1942, Hilde was among those deported from Luxembourg to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Notes state that she had an Aryan husband in Frankfurt/M., Funfbrunnen (Luxemburg). What happened to Bernard Stilgebauer is unclear.
Between 1941 and 1945, Theresienstadt, a former military fortress, served as a Jewish ghetto and transit camp. From there, the Nazis deported Jews on to extermination camps in Riga, Lublin, Sobibor and Auschwitz, among others. To disguise its true intent, Nazis described Theresienstadt in propaganda as a ‘spa town’ for Jews. By September 1942, it held over 53,000 people in poor, overcrowded conditions.
Hilde was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on 6th September 1943.
The Gatehouse, Auschwitz Concentration Camp © www.auschwitz.org.pl
Only 36 Jews of the 674 deported from Luxembourg survived the Nazi concentration camps. Hilde wasn’t one of them.
So, if you visit gallery 12 during the current exhibition, perhaps spend a moment of reflection with an unassuming portrait bust remembering Hilde and all the other victims of the Holocaust.
It is a sobering thought that the nameless portrait bust that has sat in our collection since 1931 (when Hilde would have been 41 years old) now has a name and a history, but her story is far from complete.
If you have any more information about Hilde (Hilda) Leonie Irma Stilgebauer, nee Lust, that you could share with us, please contact us in the comments below or at mag.vsblog@gmail.com