No Pretty Pictures

In Homo Sacer, the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben discusses the link between the “modern State” and “the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University, 1998, p. 6). Anita’s account also unveils this allegedly covert bond. When she says, “Every time I looked in the mirror all I could think of was: Jew, Jew. Ugly, obvious Jew girl” (55), she’s connecting the body she was born with the identity that the “modern State”—the Nazis—attaches to it. All types of people can have Anita’s features, but Nazis assign her features to Jewish identity and use that to dehumanize and brutalize them. Anita struggles with her body and its imposed associations with her identity. Her story also reveals the brittleness of identity, as she and her family had “comfortable lives” (xii) until the Nazis came along and ejected them from society.

Stigmatized and isolated, the Jews seem to lose everything but their bodies, so the body becomes a central focus for Anita. At the Ravensbrück concentration camp, she says, “[O]ur bodies were nothing more than two hungry, itching lumps” (111). As their society equates Jews with death, Anita and her brother must keep their bodies alive and functioning. In the camps, they have to kill the lice on their bodies and find food, eating “a raw potato in the mud” as a last resort. To use the bathroom in the boxcar, Anita climbs to the top and risks her life. She survives and feels “triumph, almost joy” (106). With the theme of bodies and societal identities, No Pretty Pictures exhibits the brutality of the Nazis. They created a savage environment in which figuring out how to use the bathroom qualifies as an accomplishment. As Anita survives, the theme also showcases her resourcefulness and willpower.

Separate from the Nazis’ lethal antisemitic construct, the body and social identity influence Anita’s perception of life. She is regularly fascinated by how people’s bodies deviate from their supposed identities. Anita remembers how her grandmother once tried to tell her something, admitting, “I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying. I was busy looking at the cold sore, right in the center of her upper lip” (10). It’s as if the cold sore becomes the grandma’s identity; she’s not a grandma, but a blister—a product of the body. After seeing Sister Ignacja washing, Anita says, “Now, all I could think of was their naked bodies under their brown habits” (58). Again, the sight of the body collapses the societal construct of the pure, bodiless nun.

The unstable relationship between bodies and social identities contributes to Anita’s use of imagery and not names or terms. A term or name can deceive and change, as illustrated by the Nazis’ use of coded language to discuss mass murder. Likewise, Anita privileges physicality in her relationships. After she is rescued, her parents don’t feel real to her in their letters, but she is overwhelmed when they show up in person. The most accurate way to assess someone or something is through nuanced observation, and Anita privileges looking over categorization.