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Helen Ciesla Covensky, 82, a Polish-born artist and Jewish Holocaust survivor who saw her vibrant abstract expressionist technique as a life-affirming rebuke of the Nazi regime that killed 6 million Jews during World War II, died at Suburban Hospital. She had heart disease.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Covensky spent much of her working life in Detroit, and her career culminated in a one-woman show at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1981. Her art was also displayed at galleries in New York and Tel Aviv and in Washington at the Kreeger Museum, whose eponym, Geico insurance chief executive David Kreeger, acquired one of her canvases in 1982.<\/p>\n
Mrs Covensky was born in Kielce, Poland, but grew up in Sosnowiec, a city west of Krakow.<\/p>\n
Her father, a lumber businessman, obtained false papers for her. Family members said he figured that her fluency in Polish and German — as well as her blond hair and green eyes — would allow her to pass as a Catholic after the outbreak of World War II.<\/p>\n
During the war, her parents and a younger sister died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. A younger brother survived the war.<\/p>\n
In the early 1940s, she volunteered as a laborer for the Germans near Stuttgart, where she helped inmates in a nearby concentration camp by tossing food over the fence.<\/p>\n
After she was liberated by the U.S. Army at the end of the war, she did translation work for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Berlin.<\/p>\n
She was reunited with her brother, and the event was covered in an Army newspaper. The article’s writer became her first husband, in 1946. Improvising in the aftermath of the war, she wore a wedding dress made from a parachute.<\/p>\n
The couple settled in Detroit in 1949, and she studied art at Wayne State University. She moved to Bethesda in 1983 to be near her two children and was a member of the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center.<\/p>\n
Her marriage to Harold Kempner ended in divorce. Her husband of 35 years, Milton Covensky, died in 1995.<\/p>\n
Survivors include her son and daughter from her first marriage who were adopted by her second husband, her brother, and three granddaughters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Helen’s granddaughter, Piera Kempner’s art<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n 1974 interview with Sue Marx<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Theatrical Trailer for A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n