Alina Szapocznikow

Who was Alina Szapocznikow?

Alina Szapocznikow was a Polish sculptor.

As a Jew, she was imprisoned in the Pabianice and Łódź Ghettos and in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt German Nazi concentration camps. She was the wife of Polish graphic designer Roman Cieślewicz. She produced casts of her body and later of her son's body.

Szapocznikow was born in Kalisz in 1926 to a Jewish medical family. Growing up in occupied Poland during World War II, Szapocznikow spent most of her adolescent years between Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. During the early stages of the war Szapocznikow worked as a nurse in Jewish settlements Pabianice and Łódź, where she endured the premature death of her father from tuberculosis in 1938. When the ghettos were liquidated in May 1942, Szapocznikow along with her mother, a paediatrician, was sent to concentration camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Terezín.

Having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, Szapocznikow started training as a sculptor in Otokar Velimski's studio in Prague.