Roman Halter was born in Chodecz, Poland into a traditional Jewish family in 1927; in 1939 he was deported with them to the Lodz Ghetto and was subsequently sent to camps at Auschwitz and Stutthof. After working as slave-labour in Dresden, he was taken on a death march, but managed to escape, arriving in 1945 in Windermere, in England's Lake District, under the auspices of the Central British Fund (for World Jewish Relief). In the postwar period he established a successful architectural practice, and after retirement he devoted himself to paintings and stained-glass works inspired by his Holocaust experience, receiving commissions from several London synagogues and exhibiting in many venues.
Architect, designer and artist Roman Halter was born on 7 July 1927 in Chodecz, Poland, the seventh and youngest child of a traditional Jewish family. In 1939 he was deported with his family to the Lodz Ghetto, where his grandfather made him promise to tell the story of the Holocaust. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz and Stutthof; afterwards he worked as a slave-labourer in munitions plants in Dresden, where he witnessed the bombing of the city by the Allies and collected bodies in the aftermath. In February 1945 he was sent on a death march, but managed to escape. Halter was just one of four people from Chodecz to survive the Holocaust.
In 1945 he was brought to Windermere, England by the Central British Fund (for World Jewish Relief), as a part of a pioneering rehabilitation scheme in which children from concentration camps in eastern Europe were transported to the Lake District. Halter subsequently apprenticed at the Structural and Mechanical Development Engineers Ltd in Slough, Berkshire. He then studied architecture and in 1950 he married fellow survivor, Susan Nador. Halter established successful architectural practices in London and Cambridge, whose projects included Tixover House (1968), a school for disabled children in Rutland (now a care home), Roman House for the Spastics Society (now Scope) in Basingstoke (1972), and integrated housing for the physically disabled at Haringey, London (1973). In the same year Halter settled in Israel. Harnessing his architectural skills within a design context, he was commissioned to design and construct the main gate to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem (1973). Halter returned to London in 1976. In 1981 he designed the entrance to Burnley Crown Court, comprising metalwork, terrazzo and an inlaid Royal coat-of-arms on the steps of the building.
After retiring, Halter created paintings and stained-glass works inspired by his Holocaust experiences, sometimes assisted by his daughter, artist Aviva Halter-Hurn, including for London's Central Synagogue (1977–78), Mill Hill Synagogue (1984), Leo Baeck College (1985–86) and North Western Reform Synagogue (1983–86). Halter’s first English exhibition was held at Ben Uri Gallery in 1976, when he exhibited his Yad Vashem designs and oil paintings, described by the Jewish Chronicle as ‘all handsome in technique, intense in feeling and luminous in colour’ (Stone 1976, p. 13). This was followed by a second show in 1979, which included glass panel designs for the Central Synagogue and a fine tapestry woven by Helen Griffith to Halter's design. In 1988 Halter held a joint exhibition with his son, painter Ardyn Halter, and Aviva, at the Manor House Society. In 2005 Halter’s paintings, featured in a Tate Britain exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps, were described as 'a deep personal expression of the atrocities witnessed and experienced as a young Jewish man under the Nazi rule. Halter is not a professional painter, but the power and sincerity of these works have unusually compelled Tate Britain to exhibit them to mark this important anniversary (Roman Halter Paintings, audio recording, part 1, IWM website). In 2006 the Imperial War Museum acquired seven oil paintings begun in 1974, created from the pain of ‘memory, separation and imagination’ of Halter’s Holocaust experience (Tessler 2007, p. 9), characterised by sharp and spiky compositional lines, typical of German expressionist art. In Shlomo I (IWM), inspired by Renaissance images of the Crucifixion which Halter saw in London's National Gallery, Christ crucified represented the body of his brother, executed by the Nazis, while Woman Wearing Mantilla (IWM) was inspired by Goya's portrait of Dona Isabel de Porcel, which reminded Halter of his mother. AJR art critic Gloria Tessler observed that the work 'has the iconography of Christian Renaissance art in its taut and strongly defined composition and the anguished power of the faces.‘ (Tessler 2007, p. 9). In 2008 Halter held a solo show of paintings and watercolours (which incorporated diary texts) at the Redfern Gallery, his ‘powerful, fractured work’ delivering ‘faces he remembers from the transports to the death camps. It is spiced with landscape miniatures broken up by tiny, marching brown figures which reflect his dreams - the rolling Dorset landscape into which the death march constantly transposes itself (Tessler 2008, p. 9).
Roman Halter died in London, England on 30 January 2012. In January 2013, the autobiographical film Roman's Journey by renowned BBC journalist Fergal Keane, premiered. In 2014 Ben Uri celebrated Halter's glass works in the exhibition Roman Halter: Life and Art through Stained Glass, while two of his 'diary' watercolours from the permanent collection featured in Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017). Halter's work is represented in UK public collections including the Imperial War Museum (which also holds his oral testimony) and Ben Uri Collection. His stained glass work is celebrated in an M. Phil thesis by Nina Hirschorn (University of Sussex, 2022).
Roman Halter in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Roman Halter]
Publications related to [Roman Halter] in the Ben Uri Library