Melania Fogelbaum

Melania Fogelbaum was a Polish poet and painter. She was born in Łódź, Poland, to Cyla Fogelbaum.

Lodz ghetto

Fogelbaum lived with her mother Cyla in the Łódź Ghetto as of 1940. Cyla died on 25 February 1942. Melania caught tuberculosis and was unable to meet the gruesome work benchmarks enforced by the Nazis. In this dire situation, fellow ghetto prisoners shared their own limited rations with Fogelbaum. She was moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 1 August 1944, and was killed soon after arrival.

Art and influence

Fogelbaum's art was discovered in the rubble of the depopulated Lodz ghetto. Nachman Zonabend, working in the prisoner commando that was clearing the former ghetto, discovered two notebooks containing poems, notes and two photographs by Melania Fogelbaum. Helena Zymler, one of Fogelbaum's friends, included several poems by Melania in a post-war anthology and she donated the notebooks and photographs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1998.