Sculptor and printmaker Bettina Adler (née Bettina Gross) was born into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1913. She began carving at an early age and in 1928 studied under a master wood-carver, afterwards studying sculpture in Prague in the 1930s, before moving to Paris to study drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution, she moved with her siblings to Wales, taking up work in a button factory in Merthyr Tydfil, where she remained throughout the war, living within the Jewish refugee community. Her father Dr Emanuel Gross died in 1936, and her mother, Bertha Maendl, perished in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. In 1947 she married German-language historian and writer Hans Günther Adler, a recent refugee from Prague (who had been imprisoned in Theresienstadt at the same time as Bettina's mother). The couple settled in London, where their son, Jeremy (later a distinguished writer, poet and academic), was born. Bettina Adler took on work as a commercial artist, creating fabric designs and linocuts, and returned to her primary practice of sculpting in the 1960s, when she worked in a variety of different media including terracotta, plaster and wood. The Adlers émigré circle also included Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Yehuda Bacon and Helga Michie, among others.
Bettina Adler died in London, England in 1993. Her work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum and the V&A.
