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Doris Zinkeisen
'The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten. First of all was the ghastly smell of typhus. The simply ghastly sight of skeleton bodies just flung out of the huts.'
Doris Zinkeisen
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Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945
oil, Imperial War Museum
Belsen: April 1945
oil, Imperial War Museum
Autobiographical Text, 1981
Imperial War Museum
Doris Zinkeisen was born in 1898 and together with her sister Anna studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She was a well-known society painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She also designed costumes and stage sets for the theatre throughout her career.
During the Second World War, she joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and in 1944 was commissioned by the Red Cross to paint the work of doctors and nurses in north-west Europe. Zinkeisen arrived at Belsen in April 1945, just after the liberation.
Doris Zinkeisen died on 3 January 1991.
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