Artist Maria (Marika) Frank Abrams was born in 1924 in Debrecen, Hungary, where she grew up until she was deported to Auschwitz with her entire extended family in mid-1944. Among those deported, only she and one cousin survived.

She drew and painted throughout her entire life. Even as a slave laborer in a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she sketched whenever her fellow Jewish slave laborers managed to get her paper and stubs of pencils.

Starving, with shaved head and rags wrapped around her feet for shoes, Maria was liberated by American troops at Magdeburg in April 1945. Three years later, thanks to a Hillel Foundation scholarship, Maria was a freshman at the University of Washington School of Art. She...