French-Israeli Holocaust survivor donates artworks to Unesco
French-Israeli artist Shelomo Selinger, a survivor of nine Nazi concentration camps, has donated two of his artworks to the United Nations cultural body Unesco. The unveiling of the restored works coincides with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
"Those who knew the camps are never free from them," Selinger, 97, wrote in his 2021 book Nuit et Lumière – Des marches de la mort au chemin de la Vie ("Night and Light: From Death Marches to the Path of Life").
"[The camps] are there every night, and with them every morning those who were assassinated by my side, witnesses of absolute and shapeless darkness from which I try to sculpt some sort of hope."
Born in the small town of Szczakowa, Poland in 1928, Selinger grew up in a Jewish family. Deported with his father in 1942 when he was 13 years old, he survived nine concentration camps and two death marches.
His mother and one of his sisters were taken to Auschwitz in 1943 and never returned, something he only learned years later.
In 1945 he was saved by a Jewish military doctor who came with the Soviet army to liberate the Terezin camp in then-Czechoslovakia. He was discovered on a pile of corpses and taken to a military field hospital. Although his health recovered, he suffered from amnesia for seven years.
Art as hope
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