Jana Zimmer Bücher

A second-generation Holocaust survivor weaves together fragments of her family's history and witness testimony through narrative and collage, using her art as transformation and remembrance. For fifty years, Jana Zimmer adhered to her mother’s directive to never ask about her past. Upon her mother's death, she discovered a trove of family photos and documents, mostly in Czech, with few cryptic notes to help her piece together their history. Late in life, Zimmer became a visual artist, using words and images to explore her parents' experiences during the Holocaust, filtered through her own discoveries after returning to her birthplace, Prague, and Terezín, where her family was interned. Exhibitions of her artwork in 2007, inspired by her half-sister Ritta, who perished in Auschwitz, included Ritta's drawings from Terezín, now part of the Prague Jewish Museum's collection. In 2015, an exhibition in Germany deepened Zimmer's exploration of her mother's experiences as a survivor and Jewish slave laborer in Nazi Germany. Through these exhibits and her visual storytelling, Zimmer confronts the challenge of remembering a past she never lived while seeking to find her place between her parents, who wished only to forget.