He himself kept for a long time a great physical strength that helped him survive in camps.
Fascinated from childhood by drawing and painting, he drew on his exercise books (notebooks), what was very bad seen by the traditional Jewish circles. His mother enrol him in a drawing class. His first masters were Y.Brauner and Zeidler, he always worshipped. When he was sixteen, he met Wilhelm Fallek who introduce him to the Fine Arts Academy of Krakow in 1929, where he stayed (remained) until 1933. In Poland he took place 'participated) in the Warsaw National Salon (IPS) and had personal exhibitions in 1931 (or 1933). He used to hang around with socialists and anarchist circles, some of them he left portraits. In Autumn 1934 he came to Paris, where he studied at the Fine Artsin Louis Roger atelier. He exhibited in Lodz in 1937. The sculptor Nahum Goldman introduced him to the Rothschild family who supported him but his independent spirit bring him to break with them.
He made a last journey to Poland.
In Paris, he met and socialized with Jewish Polish artists. There, he met Esther Guthman, a childhood friend, who lived with a Yiddish writer, Joseph Cukier who never came back from the camp where he had been interned. In Montparnasse he used to see Soutine, Kikoine, Kremegne, Dobrinsky, all much older than him.
During the war, as a stranger, he volunteered for service in the French Foreign Legion . That was his way to fight against Hitler. He was made prisoner and stayed in Germany for three years, before he could be repatriated. He tried to join the “Resistance” and went to Africa. Betrayed the day before his departure, he was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In the concentrations camps his skills were not used to protect himself. All Kapos and SS wanted a portrait of a child or a wife. The slighest delay meant knocks falling like rain, as reported by Moshe Garbasz,
in his book " A Survivor ".
Besides, because of his robust nature he was sent to the coal mine.
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When the camps were evacuated he was forced to participate in a death march towards Czechoslovakia. He bring back a paper knife he had carved in a piece of wood with a nail.
Deeply impressed by war and camps, he nevertheless always refused to do business from it. There had been only two paintings exposed, a dead colombe and a composition showing prisoners dragging other prisoners corpses, under the threat of a German soldier.
After Liberation in 1945, he came back to Paris and began to work, first at the Fine Arts in Souverbie atelier. Then he moved to a small room near Saint Laurent church towards East railway station. Later he found an atelier in Cité Falguière, an artists' place, till its destruction in 1967.
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During these years he spended time in Montparnasse and used to see Kremegue, Dobrinski and Schreter, who spent long nights together and whose he made portraits. All along his life, Markiel observed nature, as a source of inspiration but not to copy it. He said that a beautiful still-life was that which shown fundamental things, a piece of bread, a book, a glass of wine.
Because of his training, he admired and understood all the great masters, from the Italian primitives to Rembrand or Velasquez, but he did not ignore what painted Millet, Corot or Cezanne.
He died at 95 years in 2007 in Paris.