Malva Schalek

Malva Schalek ( born February 18, 1882 in Prague, † after 18 May 1944 at the Auschwitz concentration camp, also Malvina Schalkova ) was an Austrian- Jewish painter.

Life

She was born in Prague in a German -speaking Jewish family of intellectuals.

Her niece was Lisa Fittko. The school she attended in Prague and Vrchlabi ( Hohenelbe ); then she started in Munich at the Women's College to study art, which she continued in Vienna in private lessons. Your livelihood, she earned as a painter in Vienna, in her studio directly above the Theater an der Wien, until July 1938, when she was forced to flee from the Nazis and doing all her pictures had to leave. Only about 30 works from this period have surfaced again, two of which were found in the Historical Museum of Vienna. One of them, in oil paint engineered, almost life-size portrait of the actor Max Pallenberg, in 2006, determined on the legal successors in the course of reparation, of the Vienna Commission on Restitution to return.

Schalek was deported in February 1942 to Theresienstadt, where she worked with watercolors produced more than 100 drawings and paintings, which represented life in the camp. Because she refused to portray a collaborationist with Nazi doctor, she was deported on May 18, 1944 to Auschwitz and murdered there in the subsequent period.

Malva Schalek had remained single and childless.

Work

Her work, especially her drawings from the camp at Theresienstadt, is of a sober realism. The drawings were by Tom L. Freudenheim, director of the Art Museum of Baltimore, in 1978 as " perhaps the best and most complete artistic oeuvre that has survived the Holocaust" describes. It was like a miracle when they found the drawings after the liberation. Today, they are for the most part in the Art Collection of the Ghetto Fighters' House of the kibbutz Lochamej haGeta'ot in Israel.