“She was an artist doing little portraits in Long Island and not making it” in the 1970s, Mr. Page said, “and one day she said, ‘I’m going to plop down an easel on the Lower East Side and start painting the buildings I love.’ And Sol Moscot saw her — Sol Moscot from, like, a big eyeglass chain whose flagship was on the Lower East Side. He came out and said, ‘Is this for sale?’ and she said, ‘Well, uh, yeah.’ She was so excited because she hadn’t been able to sell anything.”

“Fine & Klein” — a handbag store that was a legend on Orchard Street — “said, ‘Moscot got one, we have to have one,’ ” Mr. Page recalled. “And soon she had years of commissions lined up. All the place mats in the Second Avenue Deli are hers.” (This was years before Stephen Fine was accused of trying to hire a hit man to kill Murray Klein. Mr. Fine died of a brain hemorrhage while awaiting trial in 1995.)

She signed her paintings Hedy Pagremanski, even though that has not been her legal name for years. She said that when her husband, Eric, became a citizen, “The judge said, ‘It is customary, when we are confronted with an unpronounceable name, for us to ask if we could change it to something easier,’ ” she said. “He became Page, and I became Page two years later when I became a citizen.”

She puts people in her paintings, but only if they have paused and told her their stories. In the roundabout way that life experience can affect an artist, she makes them witnesses to the here now, gone soon scene that she is documenting.

Why? For Mrs. Pagremanski, who was born in Vienna and fled as World War II was breaking out, the explanation reaches back to Europe.

“Hitler came when I was 8 years old, and I had to be hidden,” she said. “I thought if they knew us, they wouldn’t hurt us.”

When she married her husband, Eric, a survivor of concentration camps in Dachau and Utting, she said people would ask how such places could have existed and how people could have been treated that way. “He said, ‘The moment you say someone is subhuman, you can do anything.’ So I do real people to say they exist, to say we exist.”

Mrs. Pagremanski met her husband in upstate New York. They wed on New Year’s Eve in 1948.

She mentioned a commission from Goldman Sachs. “People say, ‘Those are the people who are destroying the world,’ ” she said, “but those were not the people I was painting. The people I was painting were struggling to pay their children’s tuition.”