Max Mannheimer (Neutitschein, Moravia, 1920 - 2016) was a painter and Holocaust survivor. His paintings, made for decades in relative privacy, matter because they grew out of the testimony of a man who lost nearly his entire family at Auschwitz and passed through Dachau, Allach and Mühldorf before his liberation in 1945.
After the war he settled in Germany, remarried, and from 1947 to 1962 worked for a Jewish welfare agency and a newspaper. He began painting in the 1950s under his Hebrew name, ben jakov. His first attempt to depict the past dates from 1954, and his first exhibition came in 1975, followed by numerous solo shows in Germany and other countries. His paintings are untitled.
For decades he did not speak about what he had lived through. In 1986, while travelling in the United States, the sight of a swastika caused him a nervous breakdown, and from then on he gave talks in schools and universities and led school groups around Dachau. He received many honours, among them the Auschwitz Cross and the French Legion of Honour. His paintings and testimony are today a lasting legacy of memory.