Devoted Dresses: to Franka & Margret

Olga Wolniak – painter:

We’re looking for Franka in Pola and Pola in Franka.
We’re looking for the image of a beautiful young woman,
one of many who were wiped out.
Our souvenir portrait of Franka, the sister of the dancer Pola Nireńska,
is the portrait of a phantom haunting the present through things past.
The Franka’s Mural projection was based on intuition and conjecture.
It is made of after-effects of faces, eyes, a nose, mouth, gazes, and sighs.

1;35 – 4;24
W.K. So that no trace was left. The trace just evaporates. There’s no trace of Franka, or her
prewar life. It’s tied to the fact that the whole ghetto was burned down, with all its documents, all
its photographs. All of it burned. That’s terribly important to me as well. It makes Franka a kind
of symbol of the Holocaust. Of condemning people to non-existence.
I’d like to see her face. Her smile. To be able to imagine her.
It is painful to me that I cannot imagine her. The contour of her her face, her profile.
Some kind of trace. But I have no real traces of Franka.
O.W.: And that husband of hers?
W.K.: Her husband was a well-known face in prewar Warsaw.
He was the head of the distribution company of a big American production house and gave
interviews to the press about film productions.
There’s a key in the family story. And in the family, Franka was most important. Pola herself said
so on many occasions. We also know more from Karski’s report. But Pola’s as well,
because I found three interviews with Pola, where she recalls Franka.
Franka was her elder sister. Pola was the youngest, and her darling sister protected her from
their parents in childhood when Pola was naughty. They were very close.
It is incredible that when Karski spoke of Pola’s family he only spoke of one person – Franka.
He never even mentioned that she had a brother and a sister. Pola as well, out of all her family
correspondence held onto only one card, sent in 1939 to Franka. A card that was sent back.
That was her only document from her family.

4;24- 5;24
The issue of her presence, tangibility, and trace is also tied to Franka. The story of Franka is
central to Pola and to this book. Because this is a book about the Holocaust and for a long time
I tried to find a trace of Pola’s beloved sister, whose existence I knew through only a few
sentences I found somewhere. I really searched a lot of archives. It seemed impossible there
was no trace, but I found no trace of that Franka.
It was only then I realized this was the essence of the Holocaust. That the Holocaust was
organized, conceived, so that no trace of those people was left. The fact no lists were made
when they were deported…
6;20 – 12;20
O.W.: Incredible. Weronika, this is Pola’s dress, but tell me
what years it dates back to, when she used to wear it.
W.K.: That’s a dress from the last years of her life.
From the last days, in fact.
That is, she was wearing it a few days before her suicide.
She went to see her friends in that dress when she felt lost
after quarreling with Karski and was looking for shelter.
She came in that dress, and the next day, leaving their home,
left the dress behind. A few days later she committed suicide.
And her friend held onto the dress.

O.W.: You got it from that friend. Right?
W.K.: Right. From that friend, who didn’t want to see me for years,
because Pola’s death was a major tragedy for her and I suppose she was afraid to talk about it.
In the end I managed to talk her into meeting and during a long conversation she suddenly
pulled it from her wardrobe and said: Take it.
O.W.: No wonder. I would have wanted to give it away as well.
And you were the best person.
W.K. It was important to her. After that conversation she believed the book would get written.
I do really think she felt a kind of relief giving me that dress. She actually gave it to me with the
stories. She told me a great deal about Pola, because they were quite close for many years.
She’s a very sensitive person. Her name is Nancy Schandelmeier. Today she’s getting up there;
she’s well over eighty, though a good twenty years younger than Pola.
It was only when she talked about Pola that Pola really came to life for me.
Pola killed herself in 1992. She was eighty-two years old. I never met anyone who knew Pola
when she was young. That meant I only knew the young Pola from written accounts, from letter
and articles about her. I never really felt her presence. When I met Nancy, that was when I felt
Pola’s presence, because Nancy knew how to talk about her in a vivid and tactile way.
How Pola was followed by a trail of perfume when she entered the room. How Pola moved,
the gestures she made, were written in Nancy’s body.
She showed me Pola’s gestures. I always tie how Nancy made Pola present with that dress.
That is Pola’s presence. As I was writing the book, I hung up that dress right next to the board
where I’d sketched out her family, some photos. I looked at it often. I also had a problem
grasping Pola. That’s one topic of the book, that she had this fluid identity, both national and sexual.
Her personality as an artist was also in flux…
Because her biography was, to a large degree, buried, cooked up.
It is no accident there was so little information about Pola. Firstly, the fact that she was
homosexual was carefully hidden, first by her, and then, I think, by Karski.
Secondly, everything concerning Pola’s family completely vanished. That must have been her
decision. I don’t know. That family investigation was so important to me, it was key,
because I knew that Nireńska had war trauma, though she was not a victim, in the sense that she was far
away, she was in England throughout the war. When I speak about her death,
in the way I wrote, it was very important to me not to assume why she killed herself.
I think it wouldn’t have been right. You never know. There are always so many reasons.
I think one of them may have been her sense she was losing her mind, as they say, after having lost her body.
And it seemed to her she was losing her mind, because after her incautious transaction Karski
took away her credit card and that made a conflict between them. That was a few days before
she died. It goes together with the story of that dress, because she went in that dress to see her
friends and then left it with a woman close to her. Maybe she took something in exchange,
I don’t know, I didn’t ask.

12;21 – 16;24
O.W.: We’re talking about Franka, but we’re speaking about Pola’s dress, right?
The first time I saw it, that color struck me; it’s called caput mortuum.
Neither purple nor brown. You might call it organic, gray-blue, gray-violet.
W.K.: Why do you suppose it’s called that?
O.W.: That’s a long story. Caput mortuum is a name that comes from alchemy.
It means “worthless remains,” the moment the soul passes into an ethereal state and those
soulless remnants at the bottom of the test tube were mixed with various binders, which made
that color. Its other name is “mummy brown.”
In times past, caput mortuum was made of ash, or human or animal remains.
W.K.: It was burned?
O.W.: Yes, it was burned, and those remains, that ash, was mixed with oil and turpentine to
make this pigment. After the eighteenth century synthetic ingredients were most often used,
and a variety of iron ore, known as “hematite” (blood red).
It’s a very sophisticated blue-gray, but also highly organic.
It’s a very refined color, yet sad. Depressing is more like it.

W.K.: Because she suffered from depression.
O.W.: Exactly. You’re dressed in yellow. That’s a color that overpowers you.
I’m dressed in black. But that color would make us both invisible.
W.K.: The cut of that dress also hides the shape of the body, doesn’t it? Pola had a marvelous
figure. She was shapely right up until she succumbed to depression. And she fell into a very
heavy depression at around fifty, then she stopped dancing. And when she stopped dancing,
she stopped teaching, because Karski asked her to. She didn’t dance for ten years and was
horribly depressed those ten years, with many suicide attempts. She recovered when she
started dancing again. For those ten years her figure went to seed.
She gained weight, of course, but she also developed arthritis. After that, she stopped dancing.
She worked on choreography sitting in a chair. It was very hard for her to move at all. Although
apparently she still had beautiful hand gestures. After that depression she dressed in baggy clothing.

Katarzyna Wińska: oral history archive and video
Olga Wolniak: Mural for Franka
Weronika Kostyrko and Olga Wolniak: recorded conversation
Jolanta Krukowska : performance in Pola’s dress photographed by
Piotr Jaxa: in homage to Halina Hulanicka –
Jolanta Krukowska’s and Pola Nireńska’s dance teacher.
Pola’s dress lent by Weronika Kostyrko
Tomek Gajewski: editor
Space: Muzeum Woli 2023