Marika Eversfield was born in 1914 in Gyòr near Budapest. She studied at the art school in Vienna and moved to London with her first husband after their marriage in 1935. They divorced four years later, but Marika stayed in London working as a housemaid and a fire warden. This decision probably saved her life as Marika’s mother and maternal grandparents all perished in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Marika worked at the Georgic Society, an organisation that provided training and employment for widowed refugee women.
Marika did various jobs in antique shops and making patchwork quilts for Liberty. She took up painting and, in her mid-80s, gained recognition for her work and won the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea art competition. She married the love of her life in the early 1980s and she and her husband bought a small house in Tuscany where they lived for a quarter of the year for the next 15 years, until her husband died in 1994. She lived happily alone for the rest of her life, painting, and attending concerts. Marika died peacefully on 3 June 2014. She was 100 years old.
