Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life is historical fiction inspired by the life and work of a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Fine Arts Academy during Hitler’s rise to power. In 1938 she was robbed of her First-Place contest prize because she was a Jew. Following that humiliation, her enrollment was annulled. After Kristallnacht, she was sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents on the Côte d’Azur, where she embarked on the making of her masterpiece, “Life? Or Theater?” The novel explores the creative process that gave rise to this unique work, while illustrating the power of art to transform trauma.

When Charlotte’s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old-World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides, including that of her own mother. She struggles against her grandfather’s insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too—all the way from their internment in a bleak camp in the Pyrenees through their arduous trek on foot across mountainous backcountry to Nice.

The Vichy regime has ordered Charlotte to be bound to her grandfather as his caretaker or risk re-internment, but Charlotte is nearly driven mad by his abuse. She must decide whether to abandon him for the sake of her art. As the Nazis sweep into the South of France, rounding up Jews for deportation, Charlotte, who is alone and without identity papers, produces over 1000 paintings telling the story of a coming-of-age during Hitler’s rise to power and a coming-to-terms with a legacy of suicide. She will not be deterred from completing her masterpiece. Then she risks her life to make sure it will endure beyond her short life before she is captured by the Nazis.

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