Malva Schalek was a visual artist, witness, and victim of the holocost born in Prague in 1882 into a cultured, German-speaking Jewish family. Her family lived in a building they owned, and operated a bookstore on the ground floor. Schalek’s father died suddenly in 1889 and later her mother married a medical doctor Ludwig Schnitzer. The family moved to Hohenelbe in Northern Bohemia, where Malva completed her secondary school education. Here she displayed a measure of artistic talent and was sent to Munich, where she studied art at the Women’s Academy of Munich (Frauenakademie München) for a year.

     Afterwards, she moved to Vienna where she continued her art studies with the well-known female artist Hasek-Rosenthal and opened a studio on the top of the building of the Theater an der Wien. She quickly established a reputation as a portrait artist, the subjects of her paintings were often from middle and upper class Jewish society.

     In 1938 Germany annexed Austria and Schalek fled Vienna, leaving behind a studio full of artworks. Later she and her aunt Emma Richter moved to Leitmeritz in Czechoslovakia where her brother Robert was a judge.

In 1942 Malva Schalek was forced into the Theresienstadt ghetto located in the town of Terezín. There she was able to draw and paint more than 100 works in which she depicted scenes of life in the area. Many of the portraits Schalek produced in Theresienstadt were commissioned and she received food in payment. Also of note, in many of the portraits Schalek had written the subject’s name – in this way the portrait wa also a commemoration of the individual. These works, done in pencil, charcoal, and watercolours, were found after the liberation of the camp by the Red Army.

     In May 1944 Schalek was transferred from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz because she refused to paint the portrait of a Nazi collaborator, and as punishment she was included in the next deportation list. She was killed in Auschwitz March 24, 1945.

     The artist is represented in the the Ghetto Fighters' House museum at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot in Israel, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

     The art curator Tom L. Freudenheim, Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1978 and later deputy director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, has referred to the works she produced in the ghettos as, "perhaps the finest and most complete artistic oeuvre to survive the Holocaust.”