page_title: Rosemarie Koczy
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Rosemarie Koczy / Life
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Drawing 48, Book 193 by Rosemarie Koczy
context_page_description: Rosemarie Inge Koczy was an artist, teacher, known for her many works dealing with the Holocaust. She compiled a three-volume memoir titled I Weave You a Shroud that was published by Queensborough Community College and the City University of New York Art Gallery and Museum.
context_section_description: Koczy was born March 5, 1939, in Recklinghausen, Germany, the eldest daughter of Martha  Wusthoff and Karl Koczy. Her parents were both Roman Catholics, however  they were ethnically / racially Jews, and as such were subject to Nazi persecution. According to her memoir, Koczy was deported in 1942 at the age of 3, surviving two concentration camps, first at Traunstein (Dachau) and then at Ottenhausen (Struthof). Fifty years after the war's end she wrote of that time:
  We worked in the fields every day.  I saw the killings, the shavings, the bleachings, the torture and hunger, the cold, typhus, tuberculosis. Death was all around!  
  Remaining at Ottenhausen for several years after its liberation in 1945, she was raised afterwards by her maternal grandparents, her mother briefly and several foster families and orphanages.
  In 1959 Koczy left Germany for Geneva, Switzerland.  She was accepted into the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in 1961, where she received her diploma with distinction four years later.
  Koczy's first marriage (which brought her Swiss citizenship) ended in divorce.  She married composer Louis Pelosi, whom she had met at the MacDowell Colony, in 1984.  She became an American citizen in 1989.
  Koczy created a community art school outside of Geneva in the 1970s and in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where she taught privately over the last twenty years of her life. After 1995 she gave free lessons to  elderly and disabled residents of 
  Maple House in Ossining, where she supplied materials, arranged shows and acquisitions (many by her and her husband). The couple also hosted annual art and music gatherings in their home for many years.
  She died December 12, 2007, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. A photo of her gravestone can be found on page 168 of the book Rosemarie Koczy: the Shroud Weaver. 
  In November 2017, during an exhibition of more than 100 of her works bequeathed to the city of Recklinghausen, her life story was examined by a local historian and a town official, who claimed that her memoir had been forged. Subsequent examination showed, however, that most of these allegations were false, and the remaining ones were unproven.
caption: Detail of Drawing No. 48, Book 193, Rosemarie Koczy, 2007
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