The photograph of Greta and Leon and Krystyna and Ewa Haber in front of the monument to Agenor Golukhovsky in Lviv

The photograph of the Habers: parents and daughters, shown in full-figure, standing in front of the monument to Agenor Romuald Gołuchowski in Lviv (created by Cyprian Godebski; the monument was unveiled in 1901, destroyed shortly after World War II). The monument is captured without the main part - only the pedestal is visible, with the personification of Galicia giving a wreath; in the background the trees of Kościuszko Park are visible. The caption on the back indicates Easter 1930 as the date.When looking at this photograph, one can see in it the interweaving of many threads of the complex history of this part of Europe and the almost symbolic bearing of some of the visible elements. Particularly telling is the accidental inclusion in the frame of only the personification of Galicia, without the figure of Count Gołuchowski (1812-1875). The Count's monument was ambiguous: the community of Lviv erected it in recognition of the merits of the aristocrat during the Partitions (as Austrian minister of the interior and minister of state he obtained limited rights for the Polish language in courts and offices; as governor of Galicia he contributed to the development of higher education), but at the same time - because Goluchowski was a symbol of the policy of the conciliatory conservatives (as an opponent of the conspiracy movement) - it was at this monument, paradoxically, that protests against Germanization took place in the early 20th century. The park itself also has a very rich and significant history - it used to be a Jesuit garden, and the Order received the land from the city authorities, who in turn had it at their disposal because towards the end of the 16th century the Consul of the Republic of Venice, Antonio Massari (owner of the tenement house called Venice on the Market Square) created a garden in Renaissance style here and wanted Lviv citizens to use it; in the interwar period the city park was named after Tadeusz Kościuszko.

And a Polish family of Austrian-Jewish origin took a photograph at this monument and in this park. The photograph was taken on the day of Christian Easter - whose name Greta Haber wrote on the back in German; as Krzysztof Krochmalski pointed out in his correspondence with the Museum at the time of the transfer of the archives to the collection, his grandmother encountered Polish for the first time at the age of twenty after the Axers had moved to Lvov and that is why she thought and prayed in her Muttersprache until the end of her life. At the same time, Greta Haber refused to sign the German nationality list in the early 1940s, emphasising her Polishness.

Przemysław Kaniecki