Rosemarie Koczÿ, 68, Holocaust Artist

Rosemarie Koczÿ, who died December 12 at 68, survived a childhood in German World War II concentration camps, and spent her later years creating stylized images suffused with Holocaust victims.

Her art — mainly tapestries and pen-and-ink drawings — has been featured by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and also by museums and corporations in Europe. Earlier this year, a 16-foot pine carving she created of intertwined human figures, entitled "Deportation Train of the Children," was acquired by the Yad Veshem Museum, the Holocaust art gallery in Jerusalem.

Identified as an "outsider artist" since being included in a landmark 1985 show at Jean Dubuffet's Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, Koczÿ had in fact attended art school. But her lack of focus on sales, and the personal demons that drove her to single-mindedly produce at first for a select clientele lush tapestries inhabited by the faces of the killed, kept her from entering inner circle of the art world. Later she turned to starker pen and ink drawings. Her creative drive hardly qualified her for inclusion in any canonical listing of twentieth century artists.

"She didn't do cocktail parties," her husband, Louis Pelosi, said.

Born March 5, 1939, in Recklinghausen, Germany, Koczÿ in 1942 was transported to a concentration camp at Traunstein, near Dachau. Later, she was transferred to another camp in the west where she managed to survive to the end of the war despite surviving under atrocious conditions that would later inspire her art.

After the war, Rosemarie and a surviving sister lived with her grandparents, and after her grandmother died, in a Catholic orphanage, where she trained as a seamstress. Her mother, broken by war, was prevented from visiting her daughters. When she was 20, Koczÿ began studying tapestry at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work became known in Europe, and she struck up a friendship with the art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Later, her work found favor with the director of the Guggenheim, Thomas Messer.

In the mid-1970s, Koczÿ's focus began to change from decorative tapestries to directly addressing her heritage as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust and the childhood that she had been denied. She located family members, some in graveyards and some yet living, but most of the reunions ended up chilly, said her husband, Mr. Pelosi. Around the same time, Koczÿ began producing pen-and-ink images of children and grotesques in the death camps. She also worked in wood and paintings, producing some 12,000 pieces by the time of her death. Exhibitions of her work included the artist's statement, "The drawing I make every day are titled, 'I Weave You a Shroud.' They are burials I offer to those I saw die in the camps."

In 1980, Koczÿ met Mr. Pelosi, a composer, during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. They were married, and in 1989 she became an American citizen. She taught art at her studio in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. and also at local nursing homes. She suffered from depression, was occasionally hospitalized, and near the end of her life had limited use of her hands due to repetitive motion trauma from her compulsive image-making, her husband said.

Koczÿ was given a traditional Jewish burial at the Bethel Cemetery on December 14, despite eschewing most religious observances during her life. "We used to light a Menorah every Friday night to remember the missing members of her family," Mr. Pelosi said. "A rabbi told her, 'With what you've been through, don't you dare fast on Yom Kippur."

A sister and half-brother, both living in Germany, survive her.