Artist Rosemarie Koczÿ (1939-2007) was a native of Recklinghausen, Germany, and a three-year-old toddler when she and her family were deported to a concentration camp at Traunstein in 1942. Alert, sensitive, visually gifted, and upon arrival, suddenly deprived of her parents and everything familiar to her, the future artist witnessed during her most tender years humanity’s capacity for nobility and depravity.
The visual records of her experience, and of relationships she built and lost, are encapsulated in two extraordinary series of paintings and drawings.
No less powerful are her accompanying drawings, entitled I Weave You a Shroud, which represent people who shared the nightmare environment in which she lived as a child. She witnessed hundreds of people suffer needlessly and be executed, from those who were unable to withstand the cruelty of their situation to those whose inner grace survived and shone in Koczÿ’s expressive portraits, each made from memory. The QCC Art Gallery Press published Rosemarie’s memoirs consisting of three volumes titled, I Weave You A Shroud.