Portrait of a Woman, 1944

Malva Schalek (Malvína Schalková) (1882 – 1944)

Born in Prague, to an affluent, liberal Jewish family. After graduating high school, she moved to Vienna, where she studied art with the Austrian painter Marie Rosenthal-Hatschek. She later studied for one year at the Women’s Art School in Munich. After returning to Vienna, she became a noted portraitist whose works were exhibited in Vienna and Prague. In March 1938, after the Anschluss, she fled to her brother in Litoměřice, Czechoslovakia, and in 1940, she escaped to Prague. In February 1942, aged sixty, she was arrested and sent to the Terezin ghetto on Transport W. While confined in the ghetto, she painted numerous portraits, as well as scenes of everyday life. In May 1944, after refusing to paint the portrait of a physician who was collaborating with the Nazis, she was deported on Transport Eb to the “Family Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was murdered in September. After the war, approximately 140 of her paintings were located behind a double wall in one of the ghetto barracks and given to her brother, who had survived in hiding.