Painting Pain

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Born in 1933 in Hungary, as the fourteenth of sixteen children, Sara Gottdiener and her family were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. At the Polish border the train stopped, and returned to a forced labour-camp in Austria. In the same year, her father died in her presence of hunger and depravation. At the end of November 1944 the family was sent to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

In April 1945 they were liberated by the American Army. At this time, Sara was twelve years old and weighed seventeen kilograms. Sara and her family traveled, via Buchenwald, to Palestine, through the Emigration Department. She belonged to the first immigration group, arriving in Palestine in 1945.

After the War of Independence in 1949, Sara graduated from the seventh grade. She began to work at odd jobs, and completed her education through evening courses. In 1951 she was drafted into the Israeli Army. In 1954 she married Uri Atzmon, and they had six children. The Holocaust was never mentioned during all these years.

At the age of fifty, Sara Atzmon returned from a trip to Hungary and Austria and began to put on canvas what she remembered from her horrible experiences during the Holocaust.

Holocaust Homepage > Sara Atzmon's Online Gallery