Gela Seksztajn
Polish painter (1907-1943)
Gela Seksztajn (1907–1943; also known as Gele Seckstein) was a Polish artist and painter. She is known mostly for her portraits and other paintings hidden within the Ringelblum Archive, in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The paintings were found after the end of World War II, and are now held mostly in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, in Warsaw, Poland.
Early life
Gela was born in Warsaw in a working-class family. Her father was a cobbler, and her mother died in 1918. The writer Israel Joshua Singer discovered her talent. Through him she met actor and director Jonas Turkow, who introduced her in turn to the sculptor Henryk Kuna. Thanks to Kuna's help, she received a two-month scholarship to study in the ASP in Kraków. Gela paid her benefactors back in the 1930s by drawing their portraits. Gela spent about 13 years in Kraków; according to her own testimony, she studied in the academy for two years, but her name was not recorded in any of the enrollment lists of the school's archives.
“Gela Seksztajn” enters the record as polish painter (1907-1943). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gela, Seksztajn and Polish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9266707. VIAF identifies the subject as 100600004. The Library of Congress control number is n2012006253. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 1943 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gela Seksztajn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.