Claudia Heinermann worked since 2011 in the Baltic states on long-term documentary projects.
Her first project in Lithuania is Wolfskinder A Post-War Story, a project about World War II war orphans who came to Lithuania from East Prussia in search of food and shelter. At the end of World War II, the Germans fled the advancing Red Army in East Prussia and Königsberg. The mothers and children left behind suffered famine. Children had to watch helplessly as their mothers died of weakness or starvation. These children now tried to survive on their own in the forests of the Baltic states. Most of them eventually found shelter with Lithuanian peasants who secretly took them in and gave them new identities and Lithuanian names to disguise their origins. For decades they remained behind the Iron Curtain without their fate becoming known to the general public. Heinermann portrayed the wolf children and recorded their living conditions and residential environment as well as historic photographs and documents.
Her second project in the Baltic states is Siberian Exiles, a trilogy about the deportations from the Baltic states to Siberia under the Soviet regime. In the three parts, eyewitnesses speak of the deportation of men, women and children to remote regions in Siberia, the Gulag camps, the partisan movement and the beginning of the Cold War.
Heinermann worked on this project for 7 years. She interviewed deportees and resistance fighters to record their impressive life stories. She travelled to Siberia and Kazakhstan in search of traces of their stories and recorded what she found there. She also visited various archives in search for historical photos and documents on the topic. In her books she combines the historical material with her own photographs.
Artist statement: "No one has ever been convicted of the crimes against humanity the Soviets committed. In Putin’s Russia, Stalin’s past is again being brushed under the carpet. That is why it is so important to me to preserve the stories which were hidden from us behind the Iron Curtain. They need to be heard to contribute to a correct historiography."
Claudia Heinermann (b. 1967 in Iserlohn, Germany) studied Fine Arts and documentary photography. Today she is a freelance photographer living in Delft/NL. She is dedicated primarily to long-term documentary projects and contemporary historical issues as well as genocide and the consequences of war. She has worked in countries such as Bosnia, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belgium, Germany and Rwanda. Claudia has published seven photo books so far and has contributed to numerous publications both in The Netherlands and abroad. Her works have been acquired by various Collections and shown in several museums like: National Photography Museum Rotterdam, Kamp Westerbork, Kamp Vught, Liberty Park/NL, Holocaust Museum Mechelen/Belgium, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin as well as in galleries and photo festivals in The Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Georgia, Kaliningrad and Germany.
In November 2015 she published her prize winning photo book ‘Wolfskinder A Post-War Story’ and between 2020 – 2023 she published all three parts of her trilogy ‘Siberian Exiles’.
