Taking an overlooked memorial site in Markkleeberg in the Leipzig district as point of departure, artist Mandy Gehrt followed the footsteps of Holocaust survivor Dr. Zahava Szász Stessel all the way to the United States today. As 13- and 14-year-old Hungarian-Jewish girls, she and her sister survived Auschwitz and the Buchenwald satellite camp in Markkleeberg. After liberation, their paths took them through Hungary, Germany, Cyprus, and Israel, all the way to New York.
On her journeys to the sites of this postwar history, Mandy Gehrt photographed memorial sites, buildings, landscapes, and other traces of the past. The images were supplemented by conversations with Zahava Szász Stessel, memories from her book Snow Flowers, encounters with relatives, experts, and chance companions, as well as research in archives and literature. The result is a cartography of memory that does not view it as a closed chapter, but rather as a process in motion.
The publication tells of flight, new beginnings, educational paths, and self-assertion—and of the question of how survivors continued to live, learn, study, work, write, and assert their history against oblivion after 1945.
The photo book You are looking at one – Cartography of a Memory will be published in June by Hentrich & Hentrich and will be presented hot off the press at the GfZK.
The event is part of the 17. Jüdischen Woche in Leipzig – Tacheles 2026.