Biography

Childhood

Isaac Celnikier was born on May 8, 1923, in Warsaw into a modest Jewish family. He was the son of Samuel Kleiman and Esther Celnikier. His father left the family home when he was four years old. Isaac grew up with his mother, his sister Sarah, his aunt, and her five daughters. He started school in 1930 at the age of seven, where he learned Hebrew and faced antisemitism from some Polish children.

From 1934 to 1938, due to financial difficulties, his mother placed him in the Orphans' Home in Warsaw, run by pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak. Isaac returned home to his family every weekend and often accompanied his mother to meetings of the Bund (General Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement).

Although he did not receive formal artistic education during his childhood, he showed an early interest in the arts. Alongside Aleksander Lewin, an educator under Janusz Korczak, and other children, he participated in a play titled “Will There Be War Tomorrow?” for which he created the stage sets.

World War II

In September 1939, following the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, Isaac Celnikier and his family chose to flee eastward rather than be confined to the Warsaw Ghetto. In October, he informed Janusz Korczak of their departure, but Korczak refused to leave. By November, Isaac, his mother, and his sister had taken refuge in Białystok (about 140 kilometers from Warsaw, then under Soviet control), joining nearly 300,000 other Jewish refugees.

The Soviet authorities required them to choose between Soviet nationality or returning to Poland. The family opted to stay in the USSR and began settling in Białystok. While working in a factory, Isaac studied painting at a local House of the People’s Creativity. There, he connected with painters such as Abraham Frydman, Haïm Urison, the Seidenbeutel brothers (Efraïm and Menasze), and Natalia Landau. He participated in a group exhibition in Minsk in February.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. Białystok was bombarded for two days and fell on June 27. The following day, over 2,000 Jews were massacred, including nearly 1,000 burned alive in the Białystok synagogue. Isaac hid in his family’s apartment, located just a few meters from the synagogue.

By July 1941, Isaac and his family were confined to the Białystok Ghetto. The Judenrat (Jewish Council appointed by Nazi authorities) assigned them a single room shared with three other families. During the first intellectual purges, painter Abraham Frydman disappeared. Isaac initially worked in a team of house painters and later in Oscar Steffen’s workshop, reproducing 19th-century paintings.

In February 1943, mass deportations and executions began. Isaac, his mother, his sister, and Gyna Frydman attempted to escape but were forced to return to the ghetto after a failed hiding attempt with Polish friends. Facing relentless deportations, hundreds of Jews chose suicide over capture. Isaac, together with Gyna, sought to organize resistance and obtained a pistol, which was soon stolen.

The Białystok Ghetto was liquidated in August 1943. On August 15, the ghetto uprising broke out but was quickly suppressed. Gyna Frydman was killed after attempting to attack a German soldier. Isaac lost track of his mother and sister, never seeing them again. He was selected among 150 craftsmen to remain alive and endured humiliations, including marching past jeering Poles and carts piled with corpses.

Isaac was detained in Łomża prison and, by November 1943, deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. In January 1944, he was transferred to Birkenau (Auschwitz II), where he spent a month in quarantine and received the prisoner number 171870 tattooed on his left arm. In February, he was sent to Buna-IG Farben (Auschwitz III), where he worked for Malerkommando 78 Siemens.

Between January and April 1945, as the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz, Isaac endured the infamous "death marches" and survived multiple transfers: first to Mauthausen, then Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and Dachau. During one transport, Allied aircraft strafed the train, wounding Isaac in the leg. American soldiers discovered him near death on April 20, 1945, and brought him to a hospital under their control, where his leg was saved from amputation.

After his release, he was handed over to Soviet authorities and interned in a camp at Šumperk, Moravia, accused of treason simply for surviving. Assigned to forced labor, he worked as a painter of Soviet heroes and propaganda panels. Days before his scheduled transfer to the Gulag, he escaped and found refuge with Jewish friends who helped him reach Prague. In December, he returned to Białystok, where he helped erect tombstones on mass graves and inscribed the names of victims.

Education and Early Career

From 1946 to 1951, Isaac studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague, specializing in monumental painting under Emil Filla, a leading figure in Cubism and Expressionism in Czechoslovakia.

Returning to Warsaw in 1952, he collaborated with cultural periodicals and became a key figure in the Polish art scene. He founded a dissident movement of young artists called Arsenał and resisted the imposition of socialist realism. His painting The Ghetto earned him a prize at the National Exhibition of Young Artists in 1955.

Life in Paris

In 1957, due to political tensions and rising antisemitism in Poland, Isaac Celnikier moved to Paris with the help of a scholarship granted by the Ministry of Culture and Arts. Initially planning to stay for one month, he decided to settle there permanently. He made several trips to Israel, where he painted landscapes of the Jerusalem area.

Since 1953, he had participated in group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. In 1966, André Malraux appointed him a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. From 1962 onward, he held solo exhibitions in France, Israel, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. Today, his works are part of collections in France, Israel, Norway, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Poland. The artist’s oeuvre includes paintings (primarily oils, but also watercolors), drawings, and engravings.

In the late 1960s, encouraged by Serbian artist Miodrag, he created his first engravings—etchings and aquatints—in which he began to reconstruct the events of his life, from his time in the Białystok Ghetto to the extermination camps. He painted monumental works dedicated to the Holocaust, including The Ghetto, The Ghetto and the Angel, Masada, The Kaddish, Revolt, Hostages, Prague, Birkenau, and The Jewish Brides. Alongside his wartime themes, he also painted portraits and female nudes, landscapes, and still lifes.

From his first marriage to Barbara Majewska, his son Jacob was born on May 27, 1968. He later married Anne Szulmajster, with whom he had two children: Yoshua, born February 20, 1981, and Sarah, born January 8, 1990.

In 1993, the Fondation du Judaïsme Français awarded him the Mémoire de la Shoah prize.

In 2005, for the first time since leaving Poland, a major solo exhibition was organized by the French Institute in Krakow. The National Museum of Krakow presented over 300 of the artist’s works created between 1940 and 2004. For this exhibition, he received the Witold Wojtkiewicz Prize in 2006, awarded by the Krakow Section of the Union of Polish Artists.

Suffering from chronic health conditions since childhood (including asthma, and heart and lung problems), he was hospitalized frequently but remained artistically active until his death. He passed away on November 11, 2011, in Ivry-sur-Seine at the age of 88.