IN LOVING MEMORY OF CZESLAWA KWOKA (15 AUGUST 1928 TO 12 MARCH 1943)

We, the comrades of Unit 1012, will honor and remember Czesława Kwoka every year on 15 August and 12 March. We, the comrades of Unit 1012: The VFFDP, will make her one of The 82 murdered children of Unit 1012, where we will not forget her. 

Czesława Kwoka as an inmate at Auschwitz concentration camp in late 1942 or early 1943 Photograph credit: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Wilhelm Brasse

Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 Wólka Złojecka – 12 March 1943 Auschwitz) was a Polish Catholic child who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 14. She was one of the thousands of child victims of German World War II crimes against Poles. She died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, and is among those memorialized in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum indoor exhibit called Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners.

Photographs of Kwoka and others taken by the "famous photographer of Auschwitz", Wilhelm Brasse, from 1940 to 1945, displayed in that Museum photographic memorial, several of which Brasse holds up and discusses in The Portraitist, a 2005 television documentary film about Brasse, became a focus of interviews with Brasse cited in various articles and books.

Brasse's three photographs of Kwoka in particular inspired the creation of Painting Czesława Kwoka (2007), a literary award-winning collaborative work of art and verse which attempts to transport her "image and voice into our lives."