Georges Wolinski

Origins and early life

Georges Wolinski was born on 28 June 1934 in Tunis, then a French protectorate.

Work and career

He told his own origins plainly: his father, Siegfried Wolinski, was a Polish Jew who had wandered to Tunis, a craftsman in wrought iron, and his mother was Lola Bembaron, whom he himself called "the little Italian-Tunisian Jewish girl" — they married in 1928. His father was murdered by an employee in 1936, when Georges was two, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents, pastry makers in Tunis, before the family settled in France after the war.

He became one of the great press cartoonists of his century: a pillar of Hara-Kiri from the early 1960s, then of Charlie Hebdo from its founding in 1970, his drawings also ran for decades in L'Humanité and Paris Match. In 2005 the Angoulême festival awarded him its Grand Prix, the highest honor in French comics. On 7 January 2015, at eighty, he was murdered with his colleagues in the terrorist attack on the editorial meeting of Charlie Hebdo.