Marianne Placzek 1929

Half-length portrait standing in oblique view from the left, the head shown in profile view looking to the right, her hands clasped in front of the body. The sitter is wearing short wavy dark brown hair, a pink silk dress and over it a dark pink coat with a brown fur collar and fur trimmings on the sleeves and a single-row pearl necklace. The background is abstract with a brown-grey gradient on which the sitter's shadow can be seen.

JQAW# P_1929_160
Oil on canvas 126 x 84 cm
Signature: John Quincy Ɑdams 1929
Jewish Museum in Prague Inv. Nr. 082.781

Marianne Placzek (Mariana Placzková), née Pollak, 14.6.1882 Brno (CZ/SK) to 22.10.1944 (10.4.1945) Auschwitz/Oswiecim (PL), Shoa.
Marianne was born in Brno in 1882 as the daughter of the lawyer Dr. Emil Pollack (1851-1923) and Julie P., née Ullmann (1857-1933). She had a younger sister Else (married name Bondi/Bondy, 1878-1942) and grew up in a good/upper middle-class Jewish family. On June 25, 1904, she married Alfred Placzek (1870-1942), the son of the rabbi Baruch Placeck (1834-1922) and Caroline P., née Löw-Beer (1844-1914). The marriage was blessed with three children: Georg (1905-1955), Friedrich/Fritz (1906-1939) and daughter Edith (1918-1942).

Alfred Placek, who worked in the textile industry, became a partner and authorized signatory of Skene & Co, which manufactured textiles, in 1904. Alfred modernized and expanded the company, which was transformed into a stock corporation in 1914 and became his sole property in 1920. In 1927, the company was converted into a limited partnership in which Alfred and his son Fritz and Marianne held shares. By 1930, the company had around 500 employees. Marianne lived with the family in a villa in Brno (Kuonicova 18) and in a palace on the edge of the Skene factory in Alexovice near Brno. The family was well off, which enabled the children to receive an excellent education, and was also strongly committed to charity. In recognition of their charitable activities, Marianne and Alfred were made honorary citizens of Alexovice in 1922. This portrait of Adams was commissioned in 1929, probably as an expression of the family's social status. The fee was likely around 6,000 Austrian (Gold) Schillings (as can be seen from a price list communicated by Adams to the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1927), or around 30,000 euros in today's money, a significant sum that the artist was probably well able to use for his first stay in the USA in 1929 (portrait commissions in Yale, Pittsburgh and Washington).

The fate of the Placzek family took a tragic turn with the rise of the National Socialists in Germany. In the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia had to cede the German-speaking Sudeten territories to the German Reich in 1938. In the spring of 1939, the rest of Czechoslovakia was also occupied by German troops and turned into a protectorate. The racial persecution of the Jewish population began immediately. Son Fritz went into exile in England with his pregnant wife, but returned to Brno in March 1939 to persuade his parents to leave the country, but they refused. After a conflict with German managers at the factory in Alexovice, Fritz committed suicide (rumors also spoke of GESTAPO involvement). The family (and the Adams portrait) then moved to Prague. Attempts to emigrate failed. The family was later forcibly relocated to special apartments into which numerous Jewish families were cramped into and then deported. (The Adam portrait was taken from the Prague apartment to the Jewish Trust Office for subsequent sale, but remained there until the end of the war and was then handed over to the Jewish Museum in Prague).

Daughter Edith (Edita Placzeková) was deported on 30.11.1941 with transport H #594 to Theresienstadt/Terzín and from there on 15.5.1942 with transport P #999 to Riga and murdered there. Marianne and Alfred were deported to Theresienstadt/Terzín on transport Au1 585 on May 15, 1942. According to the death certificate, Alfred died there on 23.11.1942 of "melancholia gravis" and accompanying "physical deterioration", i.e. from hunger and as a broken man. Marianne survived and was deported to Auschwitz/Oswiecim on 12.10.1944 on transport Eq #1126, a date which is also generally assumed (Geni, holocaust.cz) as the date of her death. An alternative source (Makarova/Makarov, 2016 S.124-127, but without documentary evidence) states that Marianne also survived Auschwitz and ultimately died on one of the death marches during the evacuation of the concentration camp from the approaching Russian troops on April 10, 1945. Her survival in the face of long suffering in various concentration camps shows that she must have been a very strong woman. The Shoah meant that the family was almost completely wiped out: Marianne, Alfred, Fritz, Edith and Marianne's sister Else Bondi all perished. Only Marianne's son Georg, a nuclear physicist who had been abroad since 1928 and worked for Niels Bohr in Denmark in 1938, who sent him to Princeton in 1939, survived. Georg Placzek was later also a member of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. He died in Zurich in 1955 during a lecture tour, officially of heart failure, but probably by suicide.

Cross-references

Exhibited

Literature

Provenance

1929-1942 family of the sitter Brno and Prague.
1942 confiscated and stored at Treuhandstelle Prague.
Since 1945 Jewish Museum in Prague Inv.Nr. 082.781.