Marek Halter (born 27 January 1936) is a Polish-born French writer, artist, and human rights activist, best for his historical novels, which have been translated into many languages. He also directed a film, The Righteous, released in 1994.
Early life and education
1991
Halter is Jewish, and was born in Warsaw, Poland on 27 January 1936.[1][2] His father, Salomon,[1] was a descendant of a long line of Jewish printers,[3] his mother, Perl,[1] a poet. Their first language was Yiddish.[3] During World War II, two Polish Roman Catholics helped his family escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. He and his parents fled to the Soviet Union[2] spending the remainder of the war in Ukraine and Uzbekistan,[4] where he learned to speak the Uzbek language.[3]
In 1945, as a member of Uzbekistan's "Young Pioneers", Marek was selected to go to Moscow to present flowers to Joseph Stalin.[5] In 1946 the family returned to Poland, but, experiencing a great deal of antisemitism,[3] they emigrated to France, taking up residence in Paris in 1950.[4]
Embarking upon a career in painting,[4] his first international exhibition was in 1955 in Buenos Aires, and he remained in that city for two years, returning to France in 1957, where he engaged in political journalism and advocacy.[5] He learnt Spanish while in Argentina.[3]
Writing
In 1968, he founded together with his wife, Clara Halter, the magazine Élements, which published works by Israeli, Palestinian, and other Arab writers.[citation needed]
His first book was Le Fou et les Rois (The Jester and the Kings),[4] an autobiography published in 1976.
His historical novels have been translated into English, Polish, Hebrew, and many other languages.[7][8][9]
Many of his books focus on the theme of memory, including that of his own family, the history of the Jewish people, and specifically the Holocaust.[2]
Film
Halter has directed a film, The Righteous (1994; Polish: Tzedek[a]). The Righteous was nominated for a César Award for Best Documentary Film.[10] Halter is also narrator and interviewer in the film, in which he asks the question of people who saved Jews during the war "Why did you do it?". Halter and his wife, Clara, traced around 200 such Gentiles, creating many hours of videotape and around 1,000 pages of interview transcripts. They went through them all, verified their stories, initially choosing 42 stories. They refined it down to 36 men and women in 14 countries, after he "remembered the Talmudic tradition that each generation must produce 36 'righteous' for the world to continue". The film took a year to film and another year to edit, and was selected for screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1995.[2]
In 1967, Halter founded a committee for a negotiated peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis, playing a significant role in arranging the first official meetings between the two groups.[4][3] He held several meetings with Yasser Arafat.[3]
In 1990 he travelled to Poland for the first time in 40 years. There, he met another man called Marek Halter, a Catholic engineer. This man reported that he had been punished each time the French Halter's anti-Soviet activism had been mentioned in the media, and only discovered the reason years later, when he read an article in an official newspaper about Marek Halter, "the Zionist enemy".[3]
In February 2021, he was assaulted by intruders at his home in Paris, who took nothing except his keys. This was not the first time he had been assaulted, with previous attempts having been accompanied by "a few anti-Semitic or racist words".[15]