KUPER, JACK

KUPER, JACK (1932– ), graphic designer, actor, dramatist, filmmaker, and author. Kuper was born in Poland, and during World War II, at the age of nine, he was separated from his family and then spent four years hiding in the Polish countryside. His mother and brother were murdered in the Sobibor death camp. In 1947, Kuper arrived in Toronto as part of the Canadian-sponsored War Orphans Project which resettled several thousand child Holocaust survivors in Canada. He went to school in Toronto, where he studied commercial art. During the 1950s he worked as a graphic designer and actor with CBC television and began to write and produce radio and television dramas. In 1966 Kuper published an account of his wartime experiences, Child of the Holocaust. Widely praised, the book was translated into numerous languages and remains a staple of Holocaust testimony. A second autobiographical volume published in 1994, After the Smoke Cleared, chronicles Kuper's postwar life in Canada and his reunification with his father, who survived the war in Siberia. Kuper eventually turned his talents to documentary film. His most controversial documentary, Who Was Jerzy Kosinski (1996), examines the enigma of the author of The Painted Bird, ostensibly an autobiography, but a fabrication of a story very similar to that of Kuper. Kuper's other notable films include A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Birthday Trip in Hell (1991), based on the photos of a Wehrmacht soldier; Shtetl (1995), documenting the paintings of folk artist Mayer Kirshenblatt and his memories of prewar Poland; Children of the Storm (2000), on the postwar Jewish orphans who found refuge in Canada; and The Fear of Felix Nussbaum (2000), about an artist who was killed in Auschwitz. (Frank Bialystok (2nd ed.)