Selinger was born to a Jewish family in the small Polish town of
Szczakowa (today part of
Jaworzno) near
Oświęcim (Auschwitz). He received both a traditional Jewish upbringing and a Polish public school education. In 1943 he was deported with his father from the
Chrzanów ghetto to the
Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany. Three months later his father was murdered and Selinger remained alone in the camp. His mother and one of his sisters also perished during
the Holocaust. Selinger survived nine German death camps: Faulbrück,
Gröditz,
Markstadt,
Fünfteichen,
Gross-Rosen,
Flossenburg, Dresden,
Leitmeritz and finally
Theresienstadt, as well as two
death marches. He was discovered, still breathing, on a stack of dead bodies when the Terezin camp was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army. The Jewish military doctor who pulled him out of the pile of corpses transferred him to a military field hospital, where he recovered his health, but was completely
amnesic for seven years. In 1946 he boarded the Tel Haï, a ship leaving
La Ciotat and headed to the then
British Mandate Palestine with a group of young
death camps survivors who, with the help of the
Jewish Brigade of the
British Army, had crossed illegally through Germany, Belgium and France. The ship was seized outside the territorial waters of
Haifa by the
British Royal Navy. The passengers, none of whom had immigration certificates, were interned in the
Atlit detainee camp. After his liberation from the camp, Selinger joined the
Beit HaArava kibbutz near the
Dead Sea. During the
1948 Palestine war he participated in the
Sodom battle, while his kibbutz was destroyed. He was then one of the founders of the
Kabri kibbutz in the
Galilee, where in 1951 he met his future wife, Ruth Shapirovsky, who came to the kibbutz as a volunteer worker with her Haifa high school class. They were married in 1954. At that time Selinger began to fill in the gaps in his memory and to sculpt. In 1955 Selinger was awarded the Norman Prize of the
America-Israel Cultural Foundation. A year later he enrolled in
Paris at the
École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied traditional
clay modelling with
Marcel Gimond. However, he did not abandon his own personal style and continued carving directly on working materials with hammers, sledgehammers and chisels. Too poor to buy his own art materials, Selinger hunted for stone blocks in the
slum belt of Paris and returned with a very dense and hard bloc of granite capable of capturing and reflecting light.
Granite became his favourite stone. Romanian sculptor
Constantin Brâncuși introduced him to
Vosges'
sandstone ("Grès des Vosges") and gave him a grindstone of this reddish stone, a symbolic present to Selinger as a successor to Brâncuși's direct carving technique. Selinger also carved wood, mostly using easily available firewood. After three years in the Beaux Arts school, Selinger started attending what he called the "best school of all", the museums of Paris (primarily
the Louvre) and the studios of Parisian sculptors including
Ossip Zadkine,
Jean Arp,
Alberto Giacometti and
Joseph Constant. A sculpture named "Motherhood", inspired by his wife and the birth of their son Rami, earned him the Neumann Prize of the city of
Geneva, the first acknowledgement of his talent in Paris. The work is now part of the permanent collection of the
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Thus Selinger—a survivor of the German death camps—became a renowned sculptor of birth, rebirth and life itself. The
Jewish Museum of New York discovered Selinger in 1960 and displayed seven of his sculptures. After Paris art gallery owner Michel Dauberville became owner of his parents' gallery, the Galerie
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, he gave many exhibitions of Selinger's work from the 1960s through the first decade of the 21st century. Further recognition came to Selinger in 1973 when he won first prize in an international competition with his monument "The Gates of Hell", in memory of those who passed through
Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris during
World War II. In 1973 Selinger was named
Chevalier to the prestigious French
Legion of Honour by President
François Mitterrand. Since 2006, he has had the title "Officier de la Légion d'Honneur". Currently living in Paris with his wife, Selinger contributes to work in marble, granite, stone and wood. == Citations ==