Dr Lydia Tischler sits as latest in a series of busts by sculptress Frances Segelman of Jews who emerged from the Holocaust to settle in Britain
December 10, 2025 13:46
Etched with the lifetime’s experience of a Holocaust survivor who became a world-leading child psychotherapist, it’s a face surely worth immortalising.
This is Dr Lydia Tischler sitting for sculptress Frances Segelman at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, north-west London at an evening organised by Yad Vashem UK.
The sculpture is the latest in a series of busts of Holocaust survivors created by the artist. Previous subjects include Ruth Posner, who fled the Warsaw Ghetto before arriving in Britain where she enjoyed a long acting career before her death this year.
Tischler, 96, survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz before she came to Britain as one of the Jewish child refugees rescued from the camps who were housed in Windermere in the Lake District. She went on to study with Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna and became a leading child psychotherapist, her expertise transforming how mothers with mental health conditions and their babies are treated.
Segelman said: “Lydia is still this incredible, bright woman. Like all of the Holocaust survivors I’ve sculpted, she is not bitter. She’s an incredibly strong woman.”
The sitting took place last month in what was the living room of Freud’s home before it was turned into a museum.
Tischler is the 19th Holocaust survivor to be sculpted by Segelman, for whom the King and his mother Elizabeth II also sat. She initially works each bust in clay in as little as two hours. A mould is then created over the sculpture which is used to capture the artwork in bronze.
Segelman gives the finished works to her sitters so that they can remain in the family. She said: “I am capturing as many of the survivors as I can. It is my mission.
“Sculpting these people is the most incredible thing I’ve done. It is such meaningful work.” Segelman recalls her initial reluctance to capturing the faces of a Holocaust survivors when she was asked to sculpt one of the “Windermere Boys”, Arek Hersh, for Makor Jewish Culture Office, a charity in his home town of Leeds. She said: “I really didn’t want to – I had tried to avoid the Holocaust subject because it is so painful. But it turned out to be the most moving thing I had experienced for my work.
“And then the BBC asked me to sculpt Ivor Perl [who survived Auschwitz as 12-year-old boy and featured in the 2019 series The Last Survivors.] While I was sculpting him, he asked if he could call me mother.
“I couldn’t understand it but he said I had given him another life by sculpting his bust. It made him feel like his life would go on. That was so unbelievable that I decided to carry on and do as many as I could.”
The evening at the museum also included a lecture by Professor Stephen Frosh on Freud and other Jewish therapists and their escape from Austria after the Anschluss.
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