Natalia Romik. Hideouts. Architecture of Survival at the Jewish Museum, Frankfurt
“There is terror and panic in our city”, wrote the, then, 14 year old Clara Schwarz of life in, then, Żółkiew, Poland, today, Zhovkva, Ukraine, in the summer of 1942 of life under German occupation, “the Jews are building bunkers of all kinds: underground, double walls, anywhere they can find a spot to hide”.1
For Clara and her family that “spot” was a “3 metres square and a meter and a half deep” bunker under a house, a bunker dug out by Clara and other children with their bare hands; a “spot” that saved 10 people from murder and/or deportation in the Gestapo raid of November 1942. And which was subsequently expanded to a “10- by 14- metre” bunker which saved 18 individuals from being interned in the new Żółkiew Ghetto in December 1942. A bunker, a “dank, unsanitary place”, under a house, in which Clara her family and neighbours lived for 18 months.
And just one of thousands of hideouts used by Jews across Europe in the 1930s and 40s; thousands for which nine stand proxy in Natalia Romik. Hideouts. Architecture of Survival at the Jewish Museum, Frankfurt, an exhibition which aside from helping focus attention on the terror, brutality and inhumanity of the NSDAP and standing testimony to those men, women and children forced to endure that terror, brutality and inhumanity, allows for differentiated reflections on both concealment and on the built environment, on the complexity of our relationships with the environments we build…….
