Israelis mark Holocaust Day

April 13, 2010 at 12:16a.m.

Associated Press

JERUSALEM

As a 9-year-old girl, Shoshana Neuman was forced by Nazi collaborators to march across what is now Ukraine in a brutal six-week trek that her father and sister did not survive.

The only image she has of her dead family is a painting she created 40 years later of an exhausted, bearded man, his eyes closed, hoisting a small, terrified girl on his shoulders.

“I have no family pictures,” said Neuman, 78. “I painted this from memory, and it’s all I have to remember them.”

The sketch, which went on display at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Monday, is part of a new art exhibit coinciding with Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day, which focused this year on the dwindling number of survivors, 65 years after the end of World War II.

About 207,000 aging survivors remain in Israel, down 63,000 from just two years earlier. An additional 200,000 survivors live in the rest of the world.

The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, wiping out a third of world Jewry.

Israel came to a standstill Monday morning to remember them with a two-minute siren heard across the country. Pedestrians froze in their tracks, buses stopped on busy streets and cars pulled over on major highways — their drivers standing on the roads with their heads bowed.

An official wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem followed, with Israeli leaders and Holocaust survivors in attendance. Other ceremonies, prayers and musical performances took place in schools, community centers and army bases.

The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn on Israel’s calendar. Restaurants, cafes and places of entertainment shut down, and radio and TV programming was dedicated almost exclusively to documentaries about the Holocaust.