After Images

Description

 On August 3, 1944, at Il Focardo estate near Florence, German soldiers executed Nina Mazzetti and her daughters Luce and Anna Maria—the wife and children of Robert Einstein, cousin to physicist Albert Einstein. The only survivors were teenage sisters Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti, who had been informally adopted by the Einsteins years before. They were spared because they did not carry the Einstein name.

Both sisters would become significant cultural figures in post-war Europe. In London, Lorenza directed the films The Country Doctor (1953), K (1954) and Together (1956), which won an award at Cannes. Her novel Il cielo cade (The Sky Falls) was adapted into a film starring Isabella Rossellini. In Rome, she ran a puppet theater, wrote for magazines, published non-fiction, and painted works documenting her family’s story.

Paola devoted herself to a pioneering practice in Jungian Psychoanalysis painting and conducted art-therapy workshops in her Roman home as well as creating dreamlike, fairytale-inspired artwork. Both sisters transformed their trauma into powerful artistic expression.

Decades later, photographer Eva Krampen Kosloski, Paola’s daughter, returned to these sites with her mother and aunt. Her intimate photographs capture both the persistence of trauma and the endurance of beauty—from Monte Malbe estate in Umbria to Villa del Focardo and Rome. The book combines these contemporary images with family photographs, letters, the sisters’ paintings, and reflective essays by Ali Smith and Sabina Loriga, curated by Alessandro Cassin.

Published by Sellerio Editore Palermo in collaboration with the Fondazione Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, Centro Primo Levi New York, Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU.