Greenbelt resident Anne Marigza, a conservator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), did behind-the-scenes work on a WWII-era photo album that is the center of a play now onstage at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall. The play, Tectonic Theater Project’s Here There Are Blueberries, is about the photo album received by USHMM and the research their curators – two of whom are portrayed by actors in the play – and others did to identify the people in the photos and determine where and when the photos were taken. The photos, taken from June 1944 to January 1945, document official ceremonies and visits of Nazi SS officers at the Nazi’s Auschwitz camp complex and social activities there and at a nearby resort where Auschwitz staff went for rest and relaxation. One set of photos bears the inscription “Here there are blueberries” (in German), hence the name of the play.
To see the photos and read about their significance go to ushmm.org and search for: SS Auschwitz album. Go to shakespearetheatre.org/events/here-there-are-blueberries to get tickets to see the play before it closes on May 28.
Marigza’s Role
The photo album was donated to USHMM by a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who found it in an apartment in Germany in 1946 and quietly kept it for 60 years. Marigza first saw the album in May 2007 when she assessed its condition and developed a plan to conserve it. The photos, 116 in all, which the album-maker had carefully arranged and adhered to pages, had sustained some water and insect or rodent damage over the years. Marigza cleaned the surfaces of the photos and pages, spending many hours looking through a microscope and using a fine needle to gently remove accretions from pests. She also mended a few small tears and reattached a corner using a thin handmade tissue paper toned to match the area where the mends were made. While she was doing this meticulous work on the album, her colleagues were researching the photos next door. Over the years, Marigza has worked with the album several times to prepare individual pages for exhibition.
Artifact Conservation
Marigza, whose specialty is book and paper conservation, explained, “It is quite easy to determine what is wrong with something that comes in to the USHMM conservation lab. The challenge is in determining the appropriate intervention to take, given the history and meaning of the artifact, and what to clean, and selecting materials and techniques to use for repair that are effective and will integrate with the artifact and age with it in a complementary way, and that are reversible by a future conservator if necessary.” She notes that a bigger part of what USHMM does is preserving artifacts to prevent future damage, through careful handling of collection materials and storing them in a clean, pest-free environment with stable temperature and humidity. Indeed, Marigza provided guidance on housing and storing a preservation set of newsprint originals of the Greenbelt News Review and Greenbelt Cooperator (its predecessor) as part of the paper’s digital archive project.
A Career Conservator
Marigza has been with USHMM for nearly 20 years. She worked initially with special exhibitions, looking at floor layouts and case designs, specifying mounts and display times for individual paper-based artifacts, and installing and de-installing the artifacts. She now works with the Swanson Archival Digitization Project at USHMM, a grant-funded program to digitize archival collections and make them available on the web. She reviews the collections before they go to camera, gives handling instructions to the imager and makes sure that the collections are properly stored after digitization. She also provides training for staff, interns and volunteers who handle the collections.
Marigza has a master’s degree in library and information science and a certificate of advanced specialization in conservation from the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information. She came to the Washington, D.C., area for an internship at National Archives-College Park, and held short-term positions at Library of Congress and University of Maryland Libraries as well as a Mellon Fellowship in Paper Conservation in Philadelphia before going to USHMM. She is a member of the American Institute of Conservation, which is a professional organization for conservators of all disciplines, and on the advisory board of the Washington Conservation Guild.