Kalman Aron, Obituary, New York Times

Mr. Aron painted this landscape of the river town of Chinon, in the Loire Valley, in 1962 while on a 10-month tour of France. Credit Dub Rogers

Kalman Aron began drawing pencil and crayon portraits of his family in Latvia when he was 3. A child prodigy, he mounted his first one-boy gallery show when he was 7. He was commissioned to paint the official portrait of the Latvian prime minister when he was 13. He enrolled at an academy of fine arts in Riga, the capital, at 15.

Then, in 1941, when he was 16, the Germans invaded, and his parents, who were Jewish, were murdered. But Kalman’s artistic talent would spare his life. Over the next four years, he would survive seven Nazi concentration camps by swapping sketches of his captors and their families for scraps of food.

And he lived to become a prominent American portraitist. He died at 93 on Feb. 24 in Santa Monica, Calif., the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust said.

Mr. Aron was born near Riga on Sept. 24, 1924. His mother, Sonia, was from Lithuania; his father, Chaim, a custom women’s shoe designer, was from Russia.

Continue reading the full New York Times obituary by Sam Roberts