The small bag

The envelope bag made from a rectangular piece of thin cotton canvas, hand-stitched along the edges. The object is equilateral. It has a flap the size of which corresponds to the size of the pocket. A decoration is visible on the flap. In the central part of the composition there is a wreath of flowers made with colourful yarn using the overlay embroidery technique. The wreath is inscribed in a rectangular frame made in English embroidery technique. At the edge there is a bordure made in the geometric lattice technique. Numerous discolorations visible on the whole surface of the fabric.In the first half of the 1970s, Marcel Łoziński, a documentary filmmaker whose mother was friends with Lechtman, Piwińska and Zakrzewska, and who himself was friends with Marcel Lechtman (Toni's son), was making a film about the prison experiences of these three women. He recorded meetings during which they acted out scenes of interrogation and torture. The film was confiscated by the university authorities because the subject of Stalinist prisons was still censored (the most famous material subjected to preventive censorship from that period was Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner) by Kazimierz Moczarski: despite the fact that fragments of the account of a Home Army soldier imprisoned with a Nazi criminal, an executioner of, among others, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Polish Army's Katyń, were not censored), the film was a source of astonishment. Although fragments of the account by the Home Army soldier imprisoned with the Nazi criminal, executioner of, among others, the Warsaw Ghetto, Jürgen Stroop, were printed at the end of the 1960s in the high-circulation Polityka weekly, they could not be published in their entirety in book form until 1976). Years later it turned out that the negative had been destroyed (director's commentary on this film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-w2fhekx8A, accessed 18 November 2021). A small part of the material documenting the meetings of the former prisoners survived, however, and years later the director included it in the film Tonia i jej dzieci [Tonia and Her Children], in which Wera and Marcel Lechtman talk about their mother's and their own fate together with the director sitting next to them.

Przemysław Kaniecki, Marta Frączkiewicz