Walter Spizer is working on the character of the little girl at the future monument dedicated to the Vel d'hiv roundup, 1994
Shoah Memorial/Spitzer coll.

The painter and sculptor Walter Spitzer, a survivor of the Holocaust, died on 13 April 2021.

Born on 14 June 1927 in Cieszyn, a Polish town on the border with Czechoslovakia, Walter Spitzer drew from the age of four. His father is a liqueur maker and his mother is a railroad employee.

From the invasion of Poland, the 1^er September 1939, the persecution of the Jews began. The Jews of Cieszyn will be moved to the ghetto of Strzemieszyce, where they suffer violence and humiliation. Walter has to work, first at a photographer’s house and then in a factory as a welder.

During a roundup in June 1943, his half-brother, sister and nephew were executed. He later learned that his mother had also been killed. His father died in 1940 of illness. Walter was sent to the vast forced labor complex of Blechhammer in Upper Silesia, attached to the Auschwitz-III camp in April 1944. Assigned to a construction kommando, he is then transferred to an office thanks to his drawing skills that allow him to improve his daily life by swapping his sketches, made with recovered paper and coal. In 2005, he explained: "I never thought that the drawings I made in the camps were an act of resistance. I was just drawing.” In this camp he formed an unbreakable friendship with Jules Fainzang, a Pole like him but deported from France five years his senior.

Before the advance of Soviet troops, Blechhammer was evacuated in January 1945. Walter and Jules joined their comrades at the Gross-Rosen camp, then at the Buchenwald camp where they were registered on 10 February 1945. Walter is protected by the clandestine organization of the Resistance, which takes him to the "Grand camp" and he is registered as an electrician. In exchange, they engage him to testify by drawing the trials he underwent, once his freedom is regained.

Evacuated again at the beginning of April, he managed to escape with Jules around Jena and both were taken in charge by American troops.

Now an orphan, Walter decides to follow his friend Jules to France. He began studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Unable to bring back his drawings from deportation, he reproduced them from memory. He designed a composite and remarkable work. He notably illustrates the works of Malraux, Sartre or Kessel. He was the winner of the competition for the creation of a monument in Paris in tribute to the victims of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, inaugurated in July 1994 by the President of the Republic François Mitterrand.

He is the author in 2004 of a book of memories Sauvé par le dessin published by Éditions Favre, prefaced by the Nobel Peace Prize Elie Wiesel.

Walter Spitzer is a knight of the Legion of Honour, an officer of the National Order of Merit and a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

The commemorative monument of the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver created by Walter Spitzer, quai de Grenelle, Paris (15th arrondissement). France, 1994

The Shoah Memorial sends its sincere condolences to his wife and children and salutes the memory of one of the great artists of the memory of the Shoah.