Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001)

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, born to a Jewish family in Poland, grew up in the rural village of Mniszek. Her talent for needlework was evident by age eight, when she made a folk costume for a festival that earned the admiration of the village's professional seamstresses. She was 12 years old in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded her homeland in World War II. Over the next 3 years, the Germans used Jews from Mniszek and the nearby city of Rachów as slave laborers to build roads and bridges for them. In 1942, her family was ordered to report for deportation along with the other Jews. Esther decided she would not go with them; at the last minute, she took her younger sister Mania with her when she fled. Esther never saw her parents or other siblings again. She and Mania waited in the forest, then walked to the village of Grabówka, where they pretended to be Polish Catholic girls. Esther got a job with an elderly farmer whose wife was ill; Mania became a housekeeper, for the village sheriff. German soldiers routinely seized young people for forced labor, so even though she was assumed to be non-Jewish, Esther still had to hide whenever the Germans were seen in the village.

In 1944, as the Red Army approached from the east, the girls survived the fierce fighting between Russian and German troops. Two weeks later, Esther returned to Mniszek to learned that all the Jews had been taken to the nearby death camp at Majdanek. Esther joined the Polish Army and after the war ended, returned to Grabówka to get Mania. In 1946, the two of them made their way to a displaced persons camp in the city of Ziegenheim, Germany, in the American Zone. There Esther met and married Max Krinitz. In 1949, the couple, who would have three children, immgrated to the USA. In 1977, at age 50, she began making a series of fabric pictures depicting her home and family in Mniszek. She then added text to produce a memoir of her childhood and Holocaust experiences.
A traveling exhibit consisting of her 36 fabric collage and hand-embroidered panels called "Art and Remembrance"

has visited museums around the USA, and was the subject of a documentary film, Through the Eye of the Needle: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz. Her illustrated Memories of Survival was published posthumously in 2005 with commentary by her daughter Bernice Steinhardt.