User:Catherine stodolsky/Malva Schalek

Malva Schalek (1882-1944)

Painter, born in Prague, to a German-speaking Jewish intellectual family (Simon, Ekstein, see  the article on her prominent family which was active in the Czech National Movement   as well as the article in the  Wikipedia on her niece, Lisa Fittko). She went to school in Prague, Vrchlabi (Hohenelbe) and began to study  art in Munich  (Damen Akademie) and then privately, in Vienna. She earned her living as a painter in Vienna, in her studio above the Theater an der Wien, until July, 1938, when she was forced  to flee from the Nazis, leaving her paintings behind. Only some 30 works from this period have been recovered, two were found in the Historisches Museum Wien. One of these, a nearly life-sized oil   portrait of the actor Max Pallenberg, is  currently being returned to the family by the restitution authority.

Schalek (Malvina Schalkova) was deported to Theresienstadt in February, 1942, where she produced more than 100 drawings and water colors portraying life in the camp. Because of her refusal to portray a collaborationist doctor, she was deported to Auschwitz (May 18, 1944) where she perished.

Her work, especially her drawings of the camp at Theresientstadt, is characterized by a sober realism. These drawings have been described by Tom L. Freudenheim, Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1978 as "perhaps the finest and most complete artistic oeuvre to survive the Holocaust.”   They were miraculously found after the liberation and are now mostly located in the Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot in Israel.

For more information see