On the Way to Spend the Night in the Yard of the Kolhoz: Peasants sent a horse to trample us

Shoshana Neuman was born in 1932 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Ukraine), then part of Romania. In 1940, it was reintegrated into the Ukraine which was part of the Soviet Union. Her father was born in 1900 and she had an older brother, Yosile, born in 1927, and a younger sister, Esti, born in 1935. In the fall of 1941, Shoshana’s family and the other Jewish inhabitants were deported from the Czernowitz ghetto to Transnistria, a region between the Bug and the Dniester Rivers given to Romania after Romania and Germany conquered the Ukraine that July and August. Shoshana and her family travelled there by foot on a six week forced march with little food or rest and no shelter. Her sister became unable to walk because of the blisters of her feet and had to be carried by their father. They crossed the Dniester River on rafts and the Romanian soldiers pushed many Jews into the water and watched them drown. Some people bartered their clothes for food along the way. Soon after they reached the Bershad ghetto, four members of Shoshana’s family died of starvation and disease: her father, who was 41, her 14 year old brother, and her 10 year old cousin. Her 6 year old sister, Esti, died of typhus and Shoshana stayed with her body for over a week until it was removed. Shoshana and her mother lived in the Bershad ghetto until the spring of 1944 when the Soviet Army re-conquered the region. Shoshana and her mother returned to Czernowitz which was again part of the Soviet Union. She was given a set of watercolors for her birthday and she began to draw without stopping. In 1945, her teachers discovered her talent and the school principal arranged an exhibition of her work in town. From 1946-1949, as partof a state controlled intervention by a Zionist organization, Shoshana was sent to Romania where she lived in several orphanages in different cities. She studied Hebrew and prepared for immigration to Israel. Eventually the Romanian government transferred the care of the children from the Zionist organizations to Communist ones. Shoshana was sent to an ORT school (Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor / Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), a Jewish non-profit that trained displaced people in technical trades. In 1950, she received her immigration certificate for Israel. Around 1970, Shoshana decided to take a painting class and began creating works based on her memories of what she saw and experienced as a child during the Holocaust. Her works were shown in an exhibition at Yad Vashem in 2010 and, as she told an interviewer: ““I have no family pictures. I painted this from memory, and it’s all I have to remember them.”

The painting was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 by Shoshana Neuman.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Shoshana Neuman