Creet, Magdalene Katarine

Person

Creet, Magdalene Katarine

1920-1984

Magda Creet (née György), a portrait artist based in Kingston, Ontario, was born in Székesfehérvár, Hungary in 1920. She married Imre Farkas, a bicycle salesman, in 1940. In 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz with her family and her first child (born in 1941). Her child, parents, and maternal grandmother all perished at Auschwitz. Magda and her sister, Agnes, were liberated from forced labour in the Lipstadd Metalworks in 1945, and she remained in Germany as a displaced person in Kaunitz working for British Command. She obtained a work permit to move to London in 1947 where she worked as a nanny, a cleaner, a hotel receptionist, and an artists's model.

After divorcing Imre Farkas in 1947, she married Mario Creet, a chemical engineer. Before emigrating to Canada and settling in Kingston, Ontario in 1957, Magda and Mario had a daughter and a son. Another daughter and son were born in Canada, and baptized at Chalmer's Uniter Church, which Magda joined in 1964.

In the early 1970s, Magda opened a portrait studio in her house on Lower Union St. In the following decade, she photographed and wrote about many of Kingston's artists and writers, publishing profiles in the Kingston Whig Standard. Exhibitions of her work were held in 1972 and 1979. Magda Creet died in 1984, and was survived by four of her five children and her husband.

Full

Biographical sketch based on Julia Creet, "The Archive as Temporary Abode" in Julia Creet and Andrea Kitzmann, eds. Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 295-296.