Maya

Maya was arrested for her indiscretions with her paintbrush in 1942, when she was 44 years old. From 1933 onwards she produced many comical and grotesque drawings of Mr Hitler and his puppets, and ridiculed the Nazi Empire. Her work appeared in many Polish and French newspapers, and her existence came to the attention of Hitler himself, when drawings of his sexual life appeared on the pages of Le Figaro. Maya continued with her profane art until she came to the attention of the ‘thought police’.
She was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pawiak prison, situated between Dzielna Street and Pawia Street in Warsaw, for interrogation. It’s a mighty four-storey complex in a grey world, and was built by the Tsarist authorities and completed in 1835, when this part of Poland belonged to the Tsar, and the rest of the country was shared by the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
The Warsaw ghetto now sits beside it, and the prison is mainly used for political prisoners, members of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and other dissident factions. Many of these are either dispatched to an appropriate Concentration Camp, or executed in situ, and many thousands never leave the building.
During her time there Maya paints a water coloured picture in her cell, which is signed by eighteen other inmates. Some of them write poems and paint scenes of their life during their incarceration. Others look for solace in a lone elm tree in the centre of the dark yard, situated beside the female block, which is sometimes visited by an occasional sparrow or a yellow beaked blackbird. They often envy the little creatures their freedom, as they flap their wings and fly up into the sky, leaving the earthly problems behind them. Sometimes they look up at the stars twinkling and dancing in the endless sky, and wonder where Heaven is. It seems so distant and remote from their private hell, and it appears that God and his angels are unaware of their wretched existence. Maya is considered a threat to the establishment and transferred to Ravensbrück.