Marlies Schoenefeld lent her art and voice to causes in northern Ontario

Marlies Schoenefeld: Artist. Adventurer. Naturalist. Organizer. Born Feb. 28, 1939, in Beuren, Germany; died April 5, 2026, in Sudbury, Ont., from a stroke complicated by a chronic heart condition; aged 87.

Marlies Schoenefeld was meticulous and her calendar was always full. She cultivated close friends and knew each of their emotional backstories. She expected much from herself and the same from those she loved. She took last-minute changes or unexpected tardiness by others personally and frivolous complaining was intolerable. This often made her vulnerable to disappointment.

Born Maria Elisabeth Schäfer on the cusp of the Second World War, she was raised in a farm village in eastern Germany, where she learned to light a stove and weed a garden before she could read. At war’s end, her 12-year-old brother was accidentally run over by an advancing American tank. Marlies was five and remembers that lilies were blooming; she hated lilies for the rest of her life.

In 1948 her father was returned home after three years of slave labour to the Soviets. It took him another two years to regain his health before he escaped to the West in hopes of picking up work. Marlies’s mother was anxious to reunite the family and since, in 1952 there was no wall dividing Germany yet, she gathered her two teenaged daughters, boarded the subway in East Berlin and got off in West Berlin, as if on a day trip. They brought nothing with them. They lived in a refugee camp, then a relative’s apartment before they could join her father in northern Germany.

Marlies insisted on learning English and at 18 found a job as a nanny in London where she was constantly reminded who won the war. She craved knowing a wider world and wrote letters to pen pals. A family friend knew a German family in Southern Ontario. Marlies wrote the elder sister and the handsome brother responded. They exchanged photos. He thought she was fearless and brave, striking out on her own. She thought he was sweet and steady. After a year his parents agreed to sponsor her to immigrate to Canada. She would clean their house and work in their store.

Sparks flew when Dieter and Marlies finally met in April 1959. They eloped in July, sneaking off to Niagara Falls. It took the birth of their only child, Klaus Peter, in 1962 to smooth things over with his parents.

Dieter was hired as a young engineer with Inco and the family settled just outside Sudbury in 1968. Marlies finished high school by correspondence, then enrolled at Laurentian University, attending classes while Peter was at school. She graduated with a BSc in biology in 1973 and would have loved to have done graduate work, but Dieter’s career took precedence. In 1974 Inco sent the them to California and then Guatemala. The family practised their Spanish and explored Central America.

Back in Sudbury four years later, Marlies planted thousands of trees as Sudbury began to green again. They hiked and paddled around their rustic camp on Onaping Lake and took kayak and canoe trips in provincial parks.

The couple would explore six continents as early ecotourists but her heart always returned to Killarney, Ont. They knew the park’s every lake, path and ridge and she painted most of them.

Marlies came to art through tragedy. At 24, her son, already a successful commercial artist, dropped dead of the same heart condition she had been diagnosed with in her 40s. Learning to paint in the places they had shared as a family was a way to keep Peter alive and the darkness at bay.

She lent her art and voice to causes all over the north as a co-founder of the Sudbury Naturalists, contributor to the Ontario Bird Breeding Atlas and Atlas of the Mammals of Ontario, and observer for the Canadian Lakes Loon Survey.

Marlies was always happier in nature. She kayaked until the lake froze and hiked until the snow came. She snowshoed the day before her stroke. Her heart never healed after Peter’s death and she had enough.

Two months later, she died at home in bed facing the lake, Dieter at her side, cat by her feet, chickadees on the other side of the window. It was the eve of her son’s birth 64 years ago.

Bernadette Hardaker is Marlies Schoenefeld’s friend.

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