Jerzy Bitter

Jerzy Bitter (Jurek Bitter) (born April 4, 1941, in Lviv, died February 7, 2020) was a Polish-American painter, known for his works depicting the Holocaust themes.

Biography
Jerzy Bitter was born on April 4, 1941, in Lviv. His mother, Cecylia Bitter (1912-2005), née Hirschfeld, was born on July 31, 1912, in Przemyśl. She was an economist and nutrition technologist. His father, Marek Bitter (c. 1903–1965), in the post-war period was an activist of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, and died in 1965. The family was not religious and adhered to communist and socialist ideals.

On September 1, 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, the family moved to Lviv, which was occupied by the Germans in 1941. The family relocated to the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, Cecylia Bitter escaped with Jerzy and initially hid him with her former teacher, Maria Strasburger, and later Zofia Czerny on Warsaw's Aryan side.

After the war, the family returned to Warsaw. Jerzy studied at the Warsaw University of Technology, earning a master's degree in chemistry in 1965. Around 1965, he moved to Israel to begin doctoral studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science (1965-1967). A tragic motorcycle accident in Israel at around the age of 25 meant he was unable to continue his chemical studies; he forgot his knowledge in chemistry. In 1968, he immigrated to the United States and began art studies at the Art Students League of New York and New York University, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1975. He painted with only one hand. In 2019, he fell in his studio and had his leg amputated due to a blood clot. He died at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Artistic career
Jerzy Bitter began painting as part of therapy after his accident. He wrote After the war, in devastated Warsaw, I was one of the few Jewish children to survive the Holocaust and one of a handful of children to survive the Warsaw ghetto. As a child I listened to the people who emerged from hiding, from the camps, from pretending to be gentiles. In my house after the war, it was as if the war was still going on. The people who survived were not able to stop telling their stories. I remember sitting on the sofa while my father's dear friend, who had survived Auschwitz, was telling her story. Her head was shaved. I was four years old at the time. My father had a very large library of memoirs and pictures from the Holocaust. When I was seven, eight, and nine years old, I immersed myself in reading and looking at these pictures. The Holocaust seemed more real than the real world...there is still in me a feeling of loss. I feel now that I was gathering the pain for many years, preparing myself to become a painter of sorrow. I want the viewer to feel the people suffering as people, as individuals, not as a mass. It was my grandparents who died, my cousins. I want the viewer to picture how child survivors of the Holocaust felt after losing everybody. He left behind a legacy of about 250 paintings, most of which depict the theme of the Holocaust, often including his daughter, with only a few depicting other themes, including several of his dog, Pinocchio. He had his studio at the corner of 52nd Street and 10th Avenue in New York City.

In 2021, the "Upstairs Gallery at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair" organized a retrospective exhibition of his paintings. His work is in the permanent collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (thanks to Henry and Rosa Segal Foundation) in Washington, D.C., Jewish Museum in New York City, Museum of the Ghetto Fighter in Haifa, Israel, and Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida.

Bitter had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his life, including at a private gallery in Montclair, New Jersey in 2013, The Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City in 1995, and an exhibition of watercolors and etchings commemorating the Ghetto Uprising in 1943 in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1995. His works were also displayed in the Gallery of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington in Northport, NY in 1995, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington DC in 1993, the Ministry of Culture and Arts in Warsaw, Poland in 1993, National Arts Center Salon in Ottawa in 1993, Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh, PA in 1992, and various other galleries and cultural institutions.

He also participated in many group exhibitions, including One-by-One, Multimedia Exhibit at Carver Public Library in Carver, MA in 1999, Hudson Guild Art Gallery in New York City in 1993, Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz in 1990, American Institute of Polish Culture in Miami, FL in 1990, Cork Gallery at Lincoln Center in New York City in 1989, and many other venues.

Personal life
Jerzy married during his studies at New York University and had a daughter, Eva, in 1980. He lived and worked in New York City. He wrote memoirs. Together with his mother, he wrote the book "Visions and stories of a childhood in the Holocaust." Smithsonian Institution has an archive tape with his interview.