After Poland was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945, Burstein was the sole survivor of his family and required a leg amputation due the injuries sustained while at the concentration camp.

In 1950, Burstein relocated to Paris, adopting the name Maryan Bergman, and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied with the French avant-garde artist Fernand Léger.

His artistic career flourished in Paris, where he received a commission to design the Monument to the Unknown Jewish Martyr and was awarded the Prix des Critiques d’Art in 1959.

In 1971, following a mental breakdown, he produced a series of drawings depicting his life story, which have since been interpreted as the artist's response to the traumatic experiences of living through the Holocaust.

Pinchas Burstein (Pinkas Bursztyn) was born in Nowy Sącz, Poland,[2] on January 1, 1927,[1] the second son of an Orthodox Jewish family.

[4] In 1945, when the Soviet army liberated prisoners of the Auschwitz death camp, Burstein was found "wounded among bodies in a lime pit", and had his leg amputated.

In a later interview he said that he had been persuaded to move there while in a displaced persons camp, but once he arrived, found himself labeled "handicapped" and sent to a kibbutz that had "a residence for elderly and disabled immigrants".

[7] In Paris Pinchas Burstein took a new name, Maryan Bergman,[3] "which he "borrowed" from his schoolmate in Bezalel, the painter Marian (Meir Marinel), who committed suicide a few years later.

Together with his wife, Annette, a Holocaust survivor he met in France,[4] he arrived in the USA aboard the SS Leonardo da Vinci.

[6] The Personnage paintings were described by Grace Glueck as brutal, exaggerated Piccasoid forms in which could be seen the influence also of Dubuffet and the CoBrA group of young European painters that included Karel Appel and Asger Jorn.

They were mocking, clownish zombies with mask-like faces and lolling tongues, suggesting visual realizations of characters from Gunter Grass's Tin Drum.

Later, they got wider and more gestural, with maybe a touch of de Kooning, winding up as slobbering, almost illegible bundles of mouths, flailing limbs, and flying organs.

[1][2] Daniel Kupermann examined these drawings as a psychoanalyst, and found them to be a "blend of infantile and monstrous, with their incontinent bodies and with the omnipresence of death in the form of grotesque terror-filled faces, seem to reveal an attempt to find a language in images that is able to transmit the experience of the obscene tragedy lived by the inmates of concentration camps".

Katarzyna Bojarska describes the film as a series of staged recollections where photographic images and reproductions of Maryan’s paintings, drawings, and lithographs alternate with a disturbing performance.