Born Vienna, May 9, 1913. Died London, July 15, 2008, aged 95
A well-known Manchester artist, Martha Schlesinger-Bendoff finally fulfilled her ambition when she became a successful painter in retirement.
Born Martha Bieler in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she grew up in a religious bourgeois household in the new Austrian Republic after the First World War.
Her Galician father, Joachim, was a businessman whose fortunes waxed and waned erratically. Her mother, Gittel, hailed from near Lemberg.
The oldest of five surviving siblings, she was educated at the famous Schwartzwaldschule, Black Forest School. Although artistic, she took dentistry at Vienna University but dropped out when her father lost money again.
Four months after the Anschluss, the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria, she left Vienna with her sister, Sonia, for domestic service with a Bolton GP. Her two brothers went to New York.
Her English pen pal, a young journalist named Bernard Sykes, acted as financial guarantor. She had a moving reunion with the man she regarded as her saviour some 50 years later.
In 1941, she married Adalbert (Bela) Schlesinger, whom she had known in Austria. The couple settled in inner city Hightown in Manchester, moving out to Crumpsall with their sons in 1959.
The heartbeat of her family through many difficult years, she worked in a variety of jobs, eventually becoming a book-keeper for two firms and, much later, secretary to the Manchester Jewish Homes for the Aged.
Retiring from this post, she rediscovered her talent for painting, specialising in portraits and landscapes. Her prize-winning work was exhibited widely in Manchester and in London. Her paintings hang in many Jewish institutions.
As an exceptional housekeeper and hostess, her home was the hub of a nostalgically reminiscing and voluble refugee culture. When Bela's Holocaust-survivor parents left Communist Hungary in the late 1940s, they stayed with her. She also took in displaced cousins and her sisters, Bertha and Sonia, who settled in Manchester.
After a long illness, Bela Schlesinger died in 1974. Remarrying some 10 years later, Martha moved south to join her new husband, Hyman (Ben) Bendoff, in Streatham, South London, where she became a pillar of the local Jewish community and enjoyed travel and a new social life.
She solidered on after Ben's sudden death in the mid-1990s, keeping up her numerous friendships and charitable work in Wizo. In 1999, after a fall and fractured hip, together with the death of her two sisters, she moved to Nightingale House residential home in South London, where she still painted.
She is survived by two sons, Ernest and Philip, and two grandchildren.