David Ludwig Bloch

David Bloch was a German-born Jewish artist, made deaf as a child by meningitis. He was born in Floss, Bavaria, and later moved to Munich. He studied commercial art at various schools for the deaf and became a porcelain decorator, until he was fired from his job and later expelled from the State Academy of Applied Arts in Munich, in both cases for being Jewish. Arrested during Kristallnacht and detained at Dachau, he escaped Nazi persecution, ultimately finding refuge among fellow European Jews in Shanghai. There, Bloch created evocative watercolors and woodcuts, documenting city life and the refugee experience. He later married Lilly Cheng Disiu, also deaf, before immigrating to the United States in 1949. In Mount Vernon, NY, Bloch worked for decades as a commercial lithographer. After he retired and visited Germany, including Dachau, in 1976, he focused his art on Holocaust themes.