Despite an early passion for art, at his father's wish, he initially trained as an accountant, before being called up for National Service.
He spent the next three years working on the Death Railway where he recorded the lives of POWs by secretly making detailed drawings of camp life.
[1] At one point, rendered skeletal by starvation, he developed tropical ulcers on his legs, and was transferred to Chunkai hospital camp, where his limbs were saved from amputation by Edward Dunlop and Major Arthur Moon.
Together with the works of Jack Bridger Chalker, Ashley George Old and Ronald Searle these drawings and paintings form a unique record of this dark time in human history.
Old and Meninsky were reunited in 1995 after 50 years as guests of the Imperial War Museum for an exhibition Victory in the Far East – held 15 August to 15 December 1995.