Bettina Adler was born into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) in 1913 and began wood carving from a young age. Immigrating with her siblings to Wales in 1939, she lived in a community with other Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, before moving to London; in 1947 she married eminent Holocaust historian H. G Adler, continuing to work as a commercial artist and sculptor and encouraging younger émigré artists.