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Autobiographical painting of partisans holding German prisoners at gunpoint after battle

Object | Accession Number: 2006.125.3

Painting by Arie (Aryeh) Singer depicting the line-up of captured German soldiers; in the background are the bodies of partisans, including a medic, sickened by an illness that struck the camp near the end of the war. It is from a series of works detailing events from his youth as a 13 year old partisan fighter in the forests northeast of Vilna, Poland, (Vilnius, Lithuania) and in Belarus from 1943-1944. After the Soviet occupation of Vilna in late 1939, Arie's family fled to Glembokie (Hlybokaye, Belarus). When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the area was assaulted by German mobile killing units, who with the help of the local populace, murdered thousands of Jews. Arie and his mother were forced into the Jewish ghetto. His father, Zvi, age 38, was killed in the massacres at Ponary in 1941. In spring 1943, Arie and his mother, Chaya, 35, escaped the ghetto, which was being destroyed by the Germans. They went into hiding in the Nievier Forest near Vilna, where they engaged in partisan activities. The area was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. After some years in a displaced persons camps, Arie and Chaya emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s. Colonel Singer began creating this series of paintings about his Holocaust experiences following a stroke.

Artwork Title
Partisans line up captured German soldiers
Series Title
Partisans Near Belarus
Date
creation:  1985-2000
depiction:  1944
Geography
creation: Tel Aviv (Israel)
Classification
Art
Category
Paintings
Object Type
Naive art (aat)
Credit Line
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Arie Singer
 
Record last modified: 2022-07-28 18:30:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn523695