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Post-war Stories

by Claudia Heinermann / Michael Iwanowski / Indre Serpytyte

Photographs: Claudia Heinermann, Michal Iwanowski and Indrė Šerpytytė

Publisher: Lithuanian Photographers' Association Kaunas Department / Kaunas Photography Gallery

Year: 2015

ISBN: 978-609-8099-12-6

Comments: softcover, catalogue of 3 brochures held together by the cover paper and a rubber band, designed by Tom Mrazauskas

Post-war Stories features work by Claudia Heinermann, Michal Iwanowski and Indre Serpytyte. The three photographers – German, Polish and Lithuanian – explore the legacy of the Second World War through three very personal projects.

In 2014, Kaunas Photography Gallery presented the artists in Post-war Stories. The exhibition was a visual narrative in a contemporary language of art that distinctively reflects stories that took place in Lithuania after the war and in a new way actualize the past.

Claudia Heinermann

Wolf Children

From 1944, thousands of German children in East Prussia were separated from their families – many for good. They fought a battle of life and death against hunger, the cold and the arbitrariness of the Soviet world. Rescued by Lithuanian farmers, they remained behind the iron curtain under false identities. For the first time, after decades of silence, they now describe the terrors of their past and how they adapted to a new life without their loved ones.

Since 2011, the Dutch photographer Claudia Heinermann and the Finnish journalist Sonya Winterberg visited the last witnesses to record their memories and document their lives including their childhood and teenage years in the small Soviet republic of Lithuania, their feelings of captivity and their lifelong solitude.

Michal Iwanowski

Clear of People

Michal Iwanowski’s work retraces an epic journey his grandfather and great uncle made in 1945 after escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, and in extreme hardship walked 2000 km to Poland in search of their family.

Clear of People documents this journey. The images and writing capture Iwanowski’s own travels through landscape marked by history as well as echoing his grandfather’s experience of a quest for safety in a hostile environment.

Indrė Šerpytytė

Forest Brothers
Former NKVD-MVD-MGB-KGB Buildings

Born in Lithuania, photographic artist Indre Serpetyte is highly concerned with the impact of the Cold War on her native country and more personally, her own family.

Her subtle and moving photographs are the result of persistent and thoughtful investigation into the political history of the war, how it has been recorded and more importantly the human experience and cost of the conflict.

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