Hana Volavkova (1904–1985)

Hana Volavková, née Frankensteinová, was born to a Jewish family in Jaroměř, Czechoslovakia. From 1924 to 1929, she studied history, art history, and classical archeology at Charles University in Prague. After graduating, she worked in the Prague Municipal Library and later as head of the library of the Museum of Applied Arts. In 1933, she married fellow art historian Vojtěch Volavka, with whom she had a son. At that time, she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. She was dismissed from her post at the Museum of Applied Arts in 1939, during the Second Czechoslovak Republic, because of her Jewish origins. In 1943, she was invited to join a small team that was building the Central Jewish Museum in Prague. She assisted in the mounting of an exhibition on the history of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia and another exhibition about the Jews of Prague in 1944. In February 1945, Volavková was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín. She was the only curator at the Central Jewish Museum who survived World War II. Her parents and her brother died in Auschwitz. During the the post-war chaos, she helped save the Museum, and became its Director in 1950. It became a treasury of more than 200,000 objects, books, and archival material from Jewish communities all over Central Europe. She wrote several major books about art history and about the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of Czechoslovakia. She also edited I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. The collection was selected from the archives of the Museum.