Leon Schönker

Leon Schönker was born in 1903 in Oświęcim

Leon Schönker was born in Oświęcim in 1903 to a family that had lived in the town since about the mid-19th century. His father, Józef Schönker, was an industrialist who founded a pesticide factory in 1905 and sat on the town council.

During World War I the family moved to Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. After the war he continued his studies in Paris and Amsterdam.

In 1922 he returned to Poland and settled in Kraków, where he helped found the Association of Jewish Painters and Sculptors and later became its president. He painted the interior of the Wolf Popper synagogue in Kazimierz and wrote for several newspapers and journals. His works are held by the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and the Hermitage.

In 1939 he became president of the Jewish Council of Elders in Oświęcim and headed the Bureau for Emigration, negotiating with German officials in Berlin. The effort failed and the Germans removed him. In 1940 the family fled, passed through the Tarnów and Bochnia ghettos, and reached Bergen-Belsen with forged papers, where they were later liberated.

After the war he reopened the family factory in Oświęcim and led the local Jewish religious association. In 1949 the Communist authorities seized the factory and imprisoned him. In 1955 the family was allowed to leave, moving to Vienna and then to Israel, and he died in 1965.