“Who was the woman who wore the hat I saw in the Jewish Museum? What was she like? Did she lie awake in the morning and watch, the way I did today, as dawn brushed light through the sky?”

 

Inspired by a hat she saw on display at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, author and illustrator Nancy Patz began a larger exploration of the power of artifacts and memory.

 

The result was Who Was the Woman Who Wore the Hat, a book she published in 2003 of moving pencil drawings, displayed here for the rst time in their entirety. Using subdued watercolors and old photographs, the drawings bring the reality of the Holocaust into sharp focus by trying to recreate the story of the woman – faceless, nameless – behind this hat.“Artifacts move us,” explains Patz. “Even when they tell us only mere fragments of the full history.”

 

On display with a selection of The Artifacts Drawings, her 2014 series exploring Holocaust artifacts and memory,The Anne Frank Center USA is proud to welcome this breakthrough exploration of history and everyday life.