Vavro Oravec – Holocaust Survivor from Slovakia

Holocaust survivor Vavro Oravec did not become an artist until after the second world war. Born in the Slovakian town of Tvrdošín in 1915, Oravec studied medicine in Bratislava during the 1930s. After being prohibited from practicing medicine because he was Jewish, he worked with Jewish children who had been expelled from school. In 1944 he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, and then sent to the concentration camps at Gross Rosen and Blechhammer.

Oravec moved to Prague after the war, where he worked as a dentist and ban to experiment with painting.   After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he emigrated to Bern, Switzerland.

The Jewish Museum In Prague organized an exhibition of his work in 2001 entitled “A Painter of Soul.”