This is the first time I sketched from a video. I was so moved by listening to a recording of our relative that I drew her 8 times, attempting each time to interpret her beauty, strength, integrity and generous spirit in an image. The video recording is an interview she gave to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch. What moved me so much was the contrast between the brutal facts that caused her family to perish and her own warm and loving outlook. She stood in line with her mother and four siblings at Auschwitz and was sorted into lines of work or death yet went on to live a full and long life as the matriarch of a new family she made with her husband Chicago. In the last minute of her recording, this speaker of truth sounds a warning for us, “It is happening all over again, not just with Jews. It’s happening in Africa, it happened in Yugoslavia. It’s happening.”

I used strong lines to show her strength, warm colors to show her spirit, and emphasized her eyes to show her veracity.