Mapping a Memory – an artistic archive project​

Artist: Mandy Gehrt

In her artistic archive project, Mandy Gehrt focuses on documenting the memories of Holocaust survivors and exploring connections to institutional memory through archives, landmarks, and museums. Her project visualizes these memories through photographs, drawings, and objects.

Gehrt traces the paths of Hungarian-Jewish communities in New York, researching archives and meeting individuals such as Dr. Zahava Szász Stessel, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor forced into labor near Leipzig in 1944/45 who now lives in New York. Gehrt’s project broadens perspective by illuminating survivors’ lives post-liberation. While many sought to leave Hungary behind, survivors have preserved their memories. Some wrote to record lost places, family, and culture; others collected objects that evoke the past, creating “new heirlooms” to pass down.

Gehrt’s archive features photographs of Hungarian objects as “new heirlooms,” collected by survivors or their children, as well as images documenting Dr. Stessel’s life after 1945, showing how she organizes her memories in her apartment. The artist captures the storytelling process by including the storyteller’s hands.

In her drawings, Gehrt combines fragments of these heirlooms (e.g., doilies) with designs from New York’s Central Synagogue, built in the style of Budapest’s Central Synagogue, as well as with a mural that survived WWarII in the basement of the Budapest Synagogue and is now displayed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Another aspect of Gehrt’s project incorporates *New York Times* excerpts from fall 1944 to April 1945 in the form of projections. By selecting articles from the “News of Food” section, aimed at New York women, Gehrt connects with Dr. Stessel’s memories of recipe exchanges as an essential part of “camp culture” in Markkleeberg. These recipes remain a link to Hungarian heritage, shared within families and communities.