WARSAW (AFP)---Jozef Szajna, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp and became an acclaimed painter, theatre director, playwright and professor died Tuesday aged 86, the Warsaw Academy of Arts said.
"Szajna was one of Poland's most original artistic personalities. A non-conformist, always true to himself and to his vision of art, a man of great talent that was more appreciated abroad than he was in his native Poland," artist Andrzej Kreutz-Majewski, a friend, told AFP.
Szajna's paintings, sculptures, installations and plays evoke the inhuman traumas of war and his harrowing four-year experience in Nazi death camps during World War II.
A member of Poland's partisan fighters, Szaja was taken prisoner by the gestapo when he was 19 and deported to Auschwitz in 1941. He was tattooed prisoner number 18729, a mark he carried on his forearm until his death.
After a failed escape attempt in 1943, Szajna was held for two weeks in a cell less than one-square meter (10.5 square feet) in size where prisoners were forced to stand squeezed together.
"I didn't know whether it was night or day. Executions marked the passing of night and day. When I was released I saw a mountain of bodies and I told myself: at least they got out," Szajna told AFP in an interview.
"I was a 'sub-human' where 'overmen' sent innocents to their deaths."
"In the United States and in France, people think I'm Jewish because I was in Auschwitz...Everyone thinks there were no (Christian) Poles in the death camp. 'Mein Kampf' (Adolf Hitler's book) explains what he wanted to do with Slavs and Poles, but no one has ever really said what happened to us during the war. We were the objects of incessant torture," Szajna said.
He was born in Rzeszow, southern Poland, in 1922. After World War II, he studied graphic art and stage craft at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts.
In the 1950s, he was one of the creators of the celebrated Ludowy theatre in Nowa Huta, a workers' suburb in Poland's historic city of Krakow.
He forged the idea of a special theatre school based on visual images and almost completely without words. "I transform life into art," Szajna said.
He left Krakow for Warsaw in the 1970s where he created the acclaimed Galeria-Studio theatre performing his own plays including Replika, Glugutiera, Dante (based on Dante's Divine Comedy) and Cervantes.
He quit as director of the theatre in protest at the communist party's December 1981 crackdown on the Solidarity trade union.
Strongly influenced by his harrowing wartime experience, Szajna's painting, installations and sculptures were an outcry against man's inhumanity.
In May, 2006 Jozef Szajna was one of 32 Auschwitz survivors who met Pope Benedict XVI, a German, during his first visit as pontiff to the Nazi camp.
He taught stage craft at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and collaborated with theatres in Britain, Germany and Israel.