Black crayon sketch of a men standing in line in the Lodz Ghetto created by a fellow inmate

Pinchas Szwarc (later Shaar) was born on March 15, 1923, in Lodz, Poland, to Jakub and Chaja Fajga Swarc, both born in 1892. His father was a carpenter and owned a lumberyard. Pinchas had three siblings: brothers, Josef, born November 17, 1921, and Lajb, born February 2, 1924,, and sister, Ester Ita, born August 1919. From an early age, Pinchas showed an interest in drawing. When he was sixteen, he met the Polish painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, a disciple of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, who encouraged Pinchas' artistic education. Pinchas had his first exhibition in 1938 and also completed photo montages for a poetry book by Moshe Broderson that was published in 1939. Then, in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Pinchas and his brothers escaped from Lodz as the German occupation began and headed east to Soviet occupied Poland. By February 1940, the Jews of Lodz had been interned in a ghetto, with most assigned to forced labor. In May, the brothers heard about ghetto conditions and decided to return to Lodz to protect their family.

Pinchas’s first worked in a factory, but when his drafting skills were discovered he was assigned to the health department. For three months, he created signposts illustrating how to prevent typhus. He was then moved to the newly organized Statistical Office, where he assisted with the graphic design for the ghetto scrip. Next Pinchas was told to create portfolios to visually present the progress of the manufacturing businesses in the ghetto. These portfolios used photographs and statistical diagrams to show the production levels of the ghetto for the German officials in Berlin. In 1941, Pinchas was assigned to create identification and registration paper work for ghetto residents. He was in the Statistical Office until 1942. During this time, he began working in his free time on theatrical sets for the ghetto theater. Pinchas viewed the theater mania at Lodz as not simply escapism and a release of tension, but also a form of moral resistance in a place where physical resistance was not possible. He was able to exercise his artistic ability and to express himself and maintain the face of a real human being. His next assignment was to build presentation cases for a new ghetto exhibition hall. Pinchas and his brothers began building a hidden bunker where the family would live. They used the construction waste from the hall as a cover for the waste from the bunker.

In 1944, the Germans liquidated the ghetto and sent the inhabitants to concentration and labor camps. Pinchas, his brothers, and his father were selected for transport to Koenigs Wusterhausen concentration camp, a sub camp of Sachenshausen, for the purpose of building housing for German citizens made homeless by the Allied bombings. Pinchas was then sent to either Stenvers labor camp or, more likely, the Kelterborn & Stenvers factory, which built prefabricated housing. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945. Pinchas and his family were reunited and returned to Lodz on May 8. They learned that his sister, Ester, and her child had been killed in Auschwitz concentration camp. Pinchas decided that he could not remain in a city where so much destruction and suffering had occurred and he decided to leave Poland around October.

He headed west and arrived at a sanatorium in Gauting, Germany, where he was hospitalized. During his recovery, a nurse brought him brushes and paint-boxes, and his passion for art was revived. From the sanatorium, Pinchas went to Munich, then in November 1947, to Paris where he strengthened his skills and developed his artistic vision. His family had settled in Israel and wanted Pinchas to join them, which he did in 1953. In 1975, Pinchas moved to New York, where he died on December 3, 1996, at the age of 73.