Edith Fuhrmann Brandmann was born September 11, 1931 in Krischatik, Romania. Edith’s father was a prosperous sugar-beet farmer and cattle rancher, her mother owned a grocery store. In 1939, she was 10 years old when the war broke out. In 1941 Jews began being rounded up but Edith and her family luckily managed to escape the deportation as the Romanian official who was in charge of rounding up the Jews in her town had borrowed money from her father, which he had not made the man repay. Goodman’s mother reminded the official of the loan and when they were calling out names for deportation he told her father, “I don’t care where, just go!”
Edith and her family then stayed with Jewish families in the neighboring town of Zastavna but eventually the same Romanian officer came with guards and all the Jews were taken to a border village. They were told to cross the border and never turn back, or they would be shot. The Polish militia on the other side of the border were refusing to let people in, but the guards got drunk and went home, allowing the family to get across safely.
"They came one day and told my parents that we have to leave...they took us to the border...they searched and searched and they thought we had money and jewelry," she recalls. "I was a little girl and I was scared to death. I remember telling my father, 'Daddy, give them everything. I want to live.'"
In September of 1941 they came to the small town of Edineț in Bessarabia, once a well known Jewish community, which was now a camp for about 3,000 Jewish people who were placed in an empty field to sleep on straw. Her mother and cousin would sneak out through the barbed wire and steal potatoes to make soup. Edith’s father made acquaintance with a baker (outside of the camp) and would sell bread to earn food for the family. He then bribed a guard and managed to get the family into a town where a kindly woman took them in. Her father later met a man who told them about a town called Chernovtsy,where there were some Jews and a ghetto. Edith and her family went and lived out the remainder of the war there. “My father was very resourceful, he did anything he could to keep us alive,” she stated. “Somehow when the need was greatest, something came through. We were lucky that we had our parents and that is how we survived.”
When the war ended, the Jews in Chernovtsy started to leave but Edith’s family was afraid to return home; they had heard that when Jewish people went back their neighbors would kill them. When some horses died at her father’s job he was arrested. He was eventually released but for months he would not leave the house before they finally decided to return to Romania.
In 1950, Edith married Max Goodman in Radauti. She was eighteen and he was twenty-six. Max had family in the United States who invited him to come and work for them. They were able to leave Romania for the U.S. in 1958, where they eventually settled in St. Paul, MN.
In 1996, Max and Edith returned to visit Romania. Max’s former house was still standing but there was no longer anyone in the neighborhood who remembered his family. Edith’s house was gone but her grandmother’s house was still there. A family living in the house was afraid she wanted it back. Edith met her former nanny, who remembered Edith and her sister. Edith has stated that antisemitism is still alive in Romania; people in Edith’s village told her they were poor because all their money went to the Jews. Nonetheless, both Edith and Max have stated that they harbor no hatred towards today’s generation of Germans or Romanians. Both have shared stories of people who had helped them during the war.
Extent
12" x 14"
Physical Form
Oil on Canvas
Type of Resource
Still Image
Subject
Holocaust Survivor Artistic Response Romania
Note
Félix de la Concha was born in León, Spain, in 1962. From 1981 to 1985 he studied at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Madrid. He was awarded the Prix de Rome at the Academia de Bellas Artes in 1989, and worked in Rome until 1994.
His paintings are always done on site, in order to capture an accurate light, and study the passage of time. He focuses on architectural subjects, not only with prominent buildings, such as Fallingwater but also on common and even deteriorated places (gas stations, street lights, abandoned trailers, burned houses…). He does individual compositions and very often series of paintings and polyptychs.
He has focused on a particular format of portraiture. In video, the sitter can be seen talking, and the painting evolving from blank canvas to the very conclusion of the work.
Beginning in February 2013, Felix de la Concha, a prominent Spanish artist, collaborated with CHGS to include Twin Cities Holocaust survivors in his latest portrait series, Portraying Memories: Portraits and Conversations with Survivors of the Shoah.
De la Concha painted survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) from all over the world. While posing, his subjects talked about their lives and shared their testimonies of survival. These sessions were recorded and depict the portraits transformation from a blank canvas to the finished piece; providing the viewer with a powerful and emotionally charged, multidimensional representation of the encounter with his sitters.
Nine local survivors participated in the project; their portraits and testimony appear on the CHGS YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/CHGSumn along with the 31 other survivors who sat with De la Concha between 2007 and 2015.
Physical location
University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. http://chgs.umn.edu/
purl
http://purl.umn.edu/229575
Access conditions
Use of this image is governed by U.S. and international copyright laws. Please contact the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies for permission to publish this image. http://chgs.umn.edu/