Marthe Rajchman

Marthe Rajchman (1910–1964) was a Polish cartographer and graphic designer. Rajchman was an internationalist who was considered a relatively famous cartographer, known for the "high standards of clarity, simplicity and accuracy" of her work. She published most of her work between 1938 and 1944. Throughout 1938, she published a series of maps for various authors, the first being Shiela Grant Duff's book Europe and the Czechs. In 1939, she married and the family moved first to Johannesburg then the US where she created maps documenting the geopolitical geography of World War II and then later migrated to South America, then later the Middle East and Southern Europe as he husbands job moved location. In each place she would take commssions as the opportunity presented. In 1951 she contracted cancer but continued to work, returning to the USA in 1961 where the family settled. She died three years later.

Life
Rajchman was the second daughter of bacteriologist Ludwik Rajchman who was the founder of UNICEF and Marja Bojanczyk, a physician whom he married in 1905. Her older sister was Irene May Rajchman and her younger brother was Jan Roman Aleksander Rajchman. Her uncle was Aleksander Rajchman, a prominent Polish mathematician and her aunt was Polish independence activist and historian of education pedagogist Helena Radlińska.

Rajchman completed her secondary education at the International School of Geneva where she was influenced by Paul Dupuy, who believed that cartography and geography should be taught on an internationalist basis. After attending L'Ecole and graduating in 1928, she studied piano at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève for two years before deciding to study geography at the Sorbonne matriculating in 1931 and graduating in 1934.

In May 1939, Rajchman married Polish diplomat Vincent Czarnowski who was Vice-Consul of the Polish Consulate in Johannesburg. In 1940, the couple emigrated to the United States with their baby son, Jan. In the US, Rajchman published a number of maps that detailed the geopolitical geography of World War II. When her husband was appointed to a position in the Pharmaceutical company Sterling Drug, the demands of the work meant the family moving to many different places including Monterrey in Mexico in 1944, then Guadalajara, then onto Córdoba in Argentina in 1946. This was followed by a spell in Buenos Aires before they moved to Cairo in 1955, Tehran in 1956 and finally Athens in 1958. She continued to take commissions.

In 1951 Rajchman was diagnosed with cancer but survived. In 1952, she attended the International Geographical Congress held by the International Geographical Union. In 1961, the family moved back to the US in a apartment in Princeton, New Jersey.