Roman holder

Roman Halter (born July 7, 1927 in Chodecz ; died January 30, 2012 in London ) was a Polish-British painter and survivor of the Holocaust.

Life

Roman Halter was born as the youngest of seven children in a Jewish family of timber merchants who spoke Yiddish as well as Polish, German and Russian. His maternal grandmother emigrated to Palestine in 1928 without her husband . After the German conquest of Poland in 1939, Chodecz's Jews were used for forced labor and in 1940 deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto ( Lodz ). His grandfather and father died there of malnutrition. When Halter was selected for the Kulmhof extermination camp with his mother and a sister , he was able to evade it. Halter was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 and transferred to Stutthof concentration camp . In November 1944 he came to Dresden on a death march . where he had to do forced labor in a munitions factory on Schandauer Strasse. He fled in early 1945 from the concentration camp and was briefly by Kurt and Herta Fuchs in the Dresden suburb Oberpoyritz added and supplied with food and clothing. To the suspicious neighbors, the Fuchs family declared him a bombed-out Polish foreign worker. At the end of the war, Halter went to Poland to look for family members who had not been murdered by the Germans, but found none.

Halter emigrated to England and studied architecture. He worked as a freelance architect in London and Cambridge. He married the Holocaust survivor Susan Halter and they had three children.

In 1974 he gave up the profession and devoted himself to painting. In his watercolors and glass pictures, he thematized scenes from the German concentration camps, sometimes as inconspicuous accessories.

Halter's work has been shown at the Imperial War Museum and Tate Modern , as well as in regional exhibitions in the UK, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at the Beth Shalom Holocaust Center in Nottinghamshire .

Works

Roman's Journey, A Memoir of Survival . Bath: Chivers, 2007
- Roman's Journey through the Night: Report from a Survivor . Afterword Martin Gilbert . Translation by Norbert Hofmann. Berlin: Ed. Tiamat, 2007 ISBN 978-3-89320-117-4
Dreams of the Holocaust: paintings by Roman Halter . 78 pages. 2008?

literature

Martin Gilbert : In Memoriam Roman Halter: Born Chodecz, Poland 7 July 1927. Died London, 30 January 2012 , in: European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Autumn 2012), pp. 172-174
Elisabeth Maxwell: Remembering for the future: [displayed at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, from 11 to 20 July 1988] / [Exhibition of Original Drawings and Reproductions by Victims of the Holocaust from Concentration Camps and Ghettos 1940-1945] . London: MacDonald, 1988 ISBN 0-356-17860-9
Toby Swift: The Conversation . Conversation between Roman Halter and Trevor Friedman. Radio play. BBC Radio 4 , June 30, 2006

Web links

Literature by and about Roman Halter in the catalog of the German National Library

Literature by and about Roman Halter in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Roman Halter , obituary in: The Telegraph, February 29, 2012

Roman Halter , at portraits for posterity

Individual evidence

↑ Chodecz , at Virtuelles Schtetl (en)
^ Daniel Fraenkel, Jacob Borut: Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians. Wallstein Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 117.

personal data
SURNAME	Halter, Roman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish-British architect and painter
DATE OF BIRTH	July 7, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	Chodecz
DATE OF DEATH	January 30, 2012
Place of death	London

[1] Chodecz , at Virtuelles Schtetl (en)

[Fraenkel-2] Daniel Fraenkel, Jacob Borut: Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians. Wallstein Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 117.