Jozef Szajna is a Polish theater director whose work has been compared to that of Grotowski and Kantor for its visually powerful transformation of historical reality into metaphoric symbolism. Born March 13, 1922, in Rzeszow, Poland, he was arrested within months of the German invasion in 1939 for his work in the Polish underground and ended up, still a teenager, in Auschwitz, prisoner number 18729. For trying to smuggle food and messages and for one escape attempt Szajna was transferred more than once to the notorious “standing cells” in the punishment barrack known as Block 11. Sentenced to death after his re-capture, he was transferred instead to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where some of his work details gave him time to draw  portraits of fellow prisoners and create, from memory (and at considerable additional risk), about 20 sketches of the Auschwitz “standing cells”, four of which survived the war and were later deposited in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

In1953, Szajna graduated from the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts with a diploma in graphic art and theater design, and from 1955-66 served as designer and artistic director of the People's Theater in Cracow’s industrial suburb of Nowa Huta. A prominent career in art and theater design included a one-man show at the 1970 Venice Biennale that featured an installation called Reminiscences, commemorating Cracow artists killed at Auschwitz. Szajna’s early work is currently represented in a major exhibition of concentration camp art work called “The Last Expression”. A visually rich and detailed preview of the exhibition with numerous essays can be viewed at   http://lastexpression.northwestern.edu , and at least one book in English is Art of the Holocaust, by Sybil Milton and Janet Blatter (New York, 1981). On February 7, 2003, when Szajna and two other survivor/artists spoke at Wellesley College in connection with „Last Expression”, attendance was so large that the panel discussion had to be moved from an off-campus movie theater to an even larger space.

In Poland Jozef Szajna is even better known, however, for his innovative work in theater. From 1971 Szajna directed the Warsaw art gallery and theater center "Studio". In Eisser’s Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,1997) the author writes in Chapter One: “Jozef Szajna is one of the foremost creators of imagistic art.  He rejects the notion of traditional theater and believes instead in theatrical art.  He seeks abstraction in his works and despises melodrama.  Szajna first began creating performance art pieces about the Holocaust in 1961 when he collaborated with Jerzy Grotowski on Akropolis.  Since then he has created a series of pieces—Empty Fields, Reminiscences, and Replika that have sought to recreate tangibly the physical space of destruction.  He utilizes found objects, historical photographs, children's toys, and the sensibilities of a visual artist to create suggestive nonspecific performance areas.  Szajna, however, is an idiosyncratic artist who, like his fellow Poles Kantor and Grotowski, creates works that are impossible to define and to reproduce.  Szajna's dramatic scenarios are personal visions and not performance texts.” http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/book.html

 After ten years of creative work at his theater center “Studio”, Jozef Szajna resigned in1981 in protest against the imposition of martial law in Poland that temporarily crushed the Solidarity movement. He continues to live in Warsaw.