Nikolai Getman

Born in 1917 in Kharkov, Ukraine. His mother died in the typhus epidemic of 1919. He remembers Russian civil war and 1921 Great Famine in Ukraine. In 1937 he enrolls in Kharkov art College, but in his third year he was called up to join Red Army to fight the battles of Second World War. He returned to Kharkov in October 1945, but soon after was arrested and sent to Gulag for 10 years for drawing a cartoon of dictator Stalin  Upon his release in 1953 Nikolai Getman made it his life's work to show life of Gulag through his paintings, that over 40 years grew to a total of 50 pieces.