Fishel Rabinowicz

Fishel Rabinowicz (1924–2024) was born in Sosnowiec, Poland. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family, he showed a talent for painting even as a child. In 1941, he was captured and his ordeal with forced labour in nine different camps of the Nazi death-machine began. In February 1945, he was sent along with 1,220 other prisoners on a 200-mile death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, where he just escaped death when the camp was liberated in April 1945.

Following his four-year recovery in sanatoriums in Germany and Switzerland, Rabinowicz was offered the chance to study graphic design at the Zurich School of Art and Craft. Following graduation, he settled in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where he married and founded a family, and made his living as a graphic designer. Only after retirement did Rabinowicz turn to fine art, translating the story of his life, his experiences, and Jewish culture into abstract paper works that gained him international fame.

This book features for the first time 40 of Fishel Rabinowicz’s paper works in full-page plates, supplemented with brief explanatory texts by the artist himself and editor Anita Winter, and an essay by art historian and curator Dorothea Strauss.

Anita Winter is the founder and president of the Zurich-based Gamaraal Foundation. She is the Coordinating Board of Jewish Organizations’ Main Representative at the UN Human Rights Council and has received numerous honors for her engagement to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, such as the Federal Republic of Germany’s Order of Merit. The Gamaraal Foundation, founded in Zurich in 2014, supports Holocaust survivors and is engaged in education on the Holocaust around the world. The foundation has received numerous honours, including the 2024 Simon Wiesenthal Prize for civic engagement to combat anti-Semitism and to educate the public about the Holocaust.