Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was 15 in 1942 when Nazis ordered the Jews of her Polish village to report to a nearby train station.

She chose to flee with her 13-year-old sister, never to see the rest of her family again.

​Decades later, determined to show her daughters the family she had lost, Esther created a series of 36 exquisite works of fabric collage and embroidery—a legacy of love, grief and the sheer force of memory.

Her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt, has created a program to bring her work beyond its home in Baltimore at the American Visionary Art Museum to share her mother’s goal of remembrance through her exquisite needlework and sharing of memories of love, grief, war and salvation.