Fishel Rabinowicz was born in 1924 in Sosnowiec, Poland, and grew up as the third of ten children in a traditional Jewish family. His talent for painting was discovered at an early age and encouraged by his father. After the German Troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thereby triggering the Second World War, the town of Sosnowiec near the German border was occupied just four days after the outbreak of the war. The life of the Rabinowicz family was violently interrupted. The majority of the family members, 31 people, fell victim to the racial madness of the German Nazis.

On May 26, 1941, Fishel Rabinowicz was captured in a street raid and transported to a Nazi labor camp and later to nine different between forced labour and concentration camps. In the concentration camp, Rabinowicz was given the number 19037: "From that moment on, I was no longer a human being, only a number". He was assigned to the commando in charge of building the motorway and later he was assigned to a working group, which laid railway tracks. In these commandos, the mortality rates were particularly high and it is by chance that he himself survived. "I had fiery red hair, which is why the Germans called me "Redhead" and gave me lighter work than the other group members. And I was never lost."

On February 9, 1945 about 1220 prisoners were chosen at the Kittlitztreben camp to set out on a 325-kilometer-long death march south to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Fishel Rabinowicz was among the chosen. The completely exhausted prisoners marched through the country for 55 days, and those who collapsed from exhaustion were shot by the SS. During the march, Fishel Rabinowicz observed from afar the bombing over Dresden. "When you were in the camp for so many years, under such a regime, you get an instinct. An animal instinct. We felt it was coming to an end. We felt that the monster was in agony. For us, it was something fantastic." When they finally arrived to Buchenwald, the prisoners were left to their own devices. Fishel Rabinowicz was close to death when, on April 11, 1945, the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the third American army.

After long stays in German and Swiss sanatoriums, Fishel Rabinowicz began training as a graphic artist and decorator at the Zurich School of Applied Arts in 1949. He then moved to the canton of Ticino to pursue his profession and married in 1955 Henny Better, from whom he had his son José in 1957. Only after his retirement did he begin to reappraise his traumatic life story through graphic expression. His works have achieved worldwide fame. Although Fishel Rabinowicz has found a way in his art to process his traumatic experiences, he - and every single survivor - remains psychologically marked by the experiences of the Holocaust.

The drawings of Fishel Rabinowicz touched everyone who saw them – this is the reason the Israeli PM B. Netanyahu, presented to the German Chancellor Mrs. A. Merkel the work Shoah-Holocaust, an original print of Rabinowicz’s work on behalf of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a meaningful and appropriate gift to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.