His life was very challenging, and he suffered much hardship, but his indomitable spirit saw him through. In his youth, Libeskind was wrongly imprisoned in a pre-war Polish prison, where he was malnourished and beaten. He narrowly escaped the Nazis during their invasion of Lodz in 1939, and fled to the Soviet Union, only to be incarcerated in a brutal Gulag.
Here, he helped his fellow inmates survive before regaining his own freedom. He trekked to the foothills of the Himalayas where he found his future wife, who narrowly escaped death herself.
The crushing post war Communist regime in Poland forced Nachman and his young family to move to Israel. Even there, life was difficult because, as he spoke mainly Yiddish, he couldn’t find work.
With very little money he took his family to New York, where he achieved a happy and settled life. He found work with a Yiddish-language printer — and discovered a talent for painting. Late in life, he enjoyed success as a Modernist painter.
