Private Papers of Miss M Kessell

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Description

Object description

Bound volume containing her journal (65pp ms) for the period 8 August – 5 October 1945 during a tour of Germany in her capacity as an official British war artist, recording in impressionistic and often poetic language her experiences in the Displaced Persons (and former concentration) camp at Bergen-Belsen, conveying a variety of scenes from camp life with an `artist's eye', including the camp school and the clothing store (`Harrods'), the repatriation of a group of Yugoslav DPs, a Jewish `engagement feast', children in the camp, and the mass graves of the concentration camp victims, also recording in evocative terms the scenes of war devastation in a number of German cities including Hamburg, Hanover and Berlin, and the condition of their inhabitants; together with a considerable number of loose draft journal pages containing further observations made during these weeks (circa 85 folios) [Note: the IWM Art collection includes a number of drawings made by Mary Kessell in the Belsen camp and in Hamburg and Berlin].

Content description

History note

Cataloguer SWW

Object Details

Category: Private papers
Related period: Second World War (content)
Creator: Kessell, Mary
Production date: 1945
Dimensions: File: Weight 4.7 kg
Catalogue number: Documents.18803

Object associations

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