BERLIN — When Nelly Toll was 8 years old, during World War II, she rewrote the Cinderella fairy tale with a feminist twist. Instead of Prince Charming, a powerful princess invited Cinderella to live in her castle and enjoy a pianist performing in a sun-drenched room.

Ms. Toll illustrated her story in seven watercolors, basing Cinderella on feisty women in Russian literature and the pianist on her mother, Rozia. But she concocted the fairy tale to transcend reality. She and Rozia, both Jewish, had locked themselves in a tiny room of a Christian family’s home in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“There is no evidence in the pictures of war, even though any minute our door might have opened to let the Nazis in,” said Ms. Toll, now 80 and living in New Jersey, who recalled hiding in 1943 and 1944.