Kalman Aron died at 93 on Feb. 24 in Santa Monica, California. He was an artistic child prodigy, including a one-boy gallery show when he was 7 and being commissioned to paint the official portrait of the Latvian prime minister when he was 13. 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.
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