Mrs. Helene Adelberg & Liesl

 

Max Pollak

  1886 - 1970 (biography)

1909  

drypoint with color aquatint, printed chine colle 

16 3/8 x 11 15/16" image size 

pencil, lower left 

Pr. Pr. (printer's proof) 

pencil editioned; pencil titled; bears red Friedl Pollak Collection stamp in lower left sheet corner; stamped "Made in Germany" on verso 

 

heavy antique-white wove 

 

 

22872 

$900.00 

A portrait of Helene Adelberg (nee Gewitsch) and her daughter Alice, known as Liesl. Helene was born in Vienna in 1881 to Herman and Friederike (Franzi) Gewitsch, the first of four siblings. The family was musically gifted and Helene, Paula, Carl, and Leo were known for their skills as pianists and violinists. Helene married Alfred Adelberg in 1902 and they had five children: Liesl, Georg, Franz, Fritz, and Eva.

Tragically, with the rise of Nazi Germany, Helene, her sister, and her youngest child were transported to the Jewish ghetto in Opole Lubelskie, Poland where they were kept for one year, to then be deported to the Sobibor concentration camp in Lublin in June of 1942. They did not survive.Liesl, pictured here with a slight smile and her hand on her mother's knee, was born in Vienna in 1903. She married Robert Landis in 1927 and the two lived briefly in London before emigrating to the U.S. via Liverpool in 1943 (her name appears on the ship's manifest of the SS Esperance Bay, April 1943). Her brothers also survived the war and emigrated to the U.S. Liesl, by then going by Alice, died in New York, NY at age 83.