SHARE
COPY LINK

HISTORY

Tracing a lost grandmother’s footsteps

An Austrian photographer has started a crowdfunding project to fund a book of images he is working on about his grandmother who was murdered in Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany.

Tracing a lost grandmother's footsteps
Objekt II - Zahnbürste 4. Photo: Marko Lipus

Marko Lipus, who grew up in Carinthia, always knew that his paternal grandmother, Maria Karničar, had disappeared when his father was just six years old. The experience had been so traumatic for writer Florjan Lipus that his mother's absence and mysterious fate became the subject of two of his books. 

“The Gestapo came and took my grandmother from her house in 1943 – her children witnessed this. She was taken to Ravensbrück and they never found out what happened to her – except that she died in February 1945,” Lipus told The Local.

Many women in the all-female camp died from disease or starvation, and several thousand prisoners were gassed before the camp's liberation in April 1945.

He doesn’t know on what charges his grandmother was arrested, but says that Carinthian Slovenes were persecuted by the Nazis and believes that she could have been helping partisans who were hiding out in the woods and mountains of Carinthia.

Lipus has visited the site of Ravensbrück over the course of a year and photographed it in different seasons. “I wanted to put myself and my camera in the footsteps of my grandmother – it’s not a documentary work but rather a subjective re-imagining of what might have happened to her.”

The SS destroyed the camp’s records and removed as many prisoners as they could as the Soviet Army approached in the spring of 1945, forcing over 24,500 prisoners on a death march. “This book should be some contribution to all the victims of national socialism who were never properly buried,” Lipus said.

As the book is self-funded and the printing and design costs are high, Lipus is using crowdfunding site wemakeit.com to raise money to help with the costs.

A €35 contribution guarantees you a copy of the book, and larger donations will be rewarded with a personal tour of the artist's studio in Vienna with coffee and cake (€120), your own private photo shoot with Lipus (€250), your name in the book’s acknowledgements and a limited special edition print of 'Kratzung Blau 16' (€360), or a signed and limited edition copy of one of the images featured in the book (€720).

The book, titled Babica, will be published in Spring 2016. To help fund the book go to: https://wemakeit.com/projects/fotobildband-babica

Photo of Marko Lipus: Stefan Zeisler

TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

SHOW COMMENTS