Of Jewish background, Skondovitch (1927 - 2011) was born in London to Eastern European immigrants. During World War II, Alfred evacuated to Banbury, Oxfordshire to escape the bombings. There he saw the paintings of Anthony Van Dyck and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres in the Broughton Castle, which ignited Alfred’s interest in fine arts. After the war, Alfred went to the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with a Zionist youth group that naively thought they could help relocate survivors. The memories of scenes witnessed at that time haunted Alfred throughout his life, informing a series of Holocaust-themed paintings spanning several decades. Following this experience, he arrived in New York at the peak of the Abstract Expressionist movement. 

In the late 1950s, Alfred moved to California where friends persuaded him to fight forest fires in Fairbanks, Alaska for the summer, where he would eventually settle down and start a family with his wife Patti and their two children. The subdued culture of Alaska allowed him to work through the trauma he witnessed in Europe and the difficulties he experienced in New York. There, he could freely express his unique style and art without public pressure and New York’s intense culture. During his career in Fairbanks, he produced over 1,000 works of art, including 70 paintings addressing his Holocaust experience, and several others from his time in New York.