Shelomo Selinger

Shelomo Selinger (born 31 May 1928) is a sculptor and artist living and working in Paris since 1956. Selinger was born to a Jewish family in the small Polish town of Szczakowa (today part of Jaworzno) near Oświęcim (Auschwitz). He received both a traditional Jewish upbringing and a Polish public school education. In 1943 he was deported with his father from the Chrzanów ghetto to the Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany. Three months later his father was murdered and Selinger remained alone in the camp. His mother and one of his sisters also perished during the Holocaust. Selinger survived nine German death camps: Faulbrück, Gröditz, Markstadt, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Dresden, Leitmeritz and finally Theresienstadt, as well as two death marches. He was discovered, still breathing, on a stack of dead bodies when the Terezin camp was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army. The Jewish military doctor who pulled him out of the pile of corpses transferred him to a military field hospital, where he recovered his health, but was completely amnesic for seven years. In 1946 he boarded the Tel Haï, a ship leaving La Ciotat and headed to the then British Mandate Palestine with a group of young death camps survivors who, with the help of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, had crossed illegally through Germany, Belgium and France. The ship was seized outside the territorial waters of Haifa by the British Royal Navy. The passengers, none of whom had immigration certificates, were interned in the Atlit detainee camp. After his liberation from the camp, Selinger joined the Beit HaArava kibbutz near the Dead Sea. During the 1948 Palestine war he participated in the Sodom battle, while his kibbutz was destroyed. He was then one of the founders of the Kabri kibbutz in the Galilee, where in 1951 he met his future wife, Ruth Shapirovsky, who came to the kibbutz as a volunteer worker with her Haifa high school class. They were married in 1954. At that time Selinger began to fill in the gaps in his memory and to sculpt.