SIMON LAKS (Warsaw, 1901-Paris, 1983) was established in Paris in 1926 to complete his musical studies. There he began his career as a composer, which was interrupted by his deportation from France for being a foreign Jew. He was first detained in a concentration camp in Beaune-la-
Rolande, France, and then in the extermination camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where he was a musician and conductor of the orchestra, which allowed him to survive.
At the end of the war, he returned to Paris.
After a long period of silence, he experienced a period of intense production between 1960 and 1967, until he ended up abandoning the composition definitively, both for aesthetic reasons and for the hard blow that the return of anti-Semitism represented for him. In the following years, he devoted himself to the public debate on Polish emigration.
The musical work of Simon Laks, who for a long time was ignored, lives a rediscovery since the year 2000.