Sofia Yudovina was born in 1916, in a traditional Jewish family living in the small town of Beshenkovichi (Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus). She attended school in her native town. Then, in 1930, she and her parents moved to Leningrad Oblast, settling in Pavlovsk (a town that had formerly served as one of the Tsar's residences), where her grandfather lived. Many of her relatives, including an aunt, an uncle, and numerous cousins, remained in Belorussia. In Leningrad, she enrolled in the Pediatric Institute, and graduated from it on June 23, 1941, the day after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War.
As a pediatrician, Sofia was dispatched to work in a small village in eastern Kazakhstan, and her parents were evacuated there with her. In 1943, the family received an official notice from the Red Army, stating that Sofia's half-brother, Efim Neiman, had been killed in action in Stalingrad. Shortly afterward, she was called up to serve as a military physician.
Sofia was initially attached to a regiment near Rzhev, where she spent two months undergoing frontline training. She was then transferred to the Smolensk region, the site of heavy fighting, and later to Tula. There, she treated wounded soldiers, sometimes tending to as many as 700 patients in a single day. Occasionally, she had to work around the clock, standing night and day at the surgical table. Her dedication to her job led to health problems, and she was also shell-shocked on one occasion. Nevertheless, she persevered. The infantry unit to which Sofia was attached often had to march long distances, covering up to 20 kilometers a day, which intensified the strain placed on her.
As her division entered Vitebsk Oblast in Belorussia, Sofia hoped to visit her family in Beshenkovichi. However, she learned that all her relatives from there had been murdered by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941. After Soviet troops had moved into Lithuania, Sofia, in her capacity as a doctor, had to participate in the exhumation of the bodies of more than 300 Jews (originally from Biržai) from a mass grave in the Pakamponis (Astravas) Forest. The protocols of this exhumation were later submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal.
In early 1945, Sofia fell seriously ill, and remained hospitalized until the end of the war. In the summer of that year, she returned to Pavlovsk, where her parents had also returned from the Soviet interior. Once there, she learned that her grandfather, along with the town's other Jews, had been murdered by the Nazis. He had refused to escape on a Friday evening, to avoid violating the sanctity of the Sabbath.
After the war, Sofia was no longer able to work as a pediatrician because of her disability, which made it difficult for her to make house calls to see her patients. As a result, she changed her specialty and became an ophthalmologist, a profession that did not require extensive walking. She worked at a clinic in Pavlovsk for twenty years, finally retiring in 1976. In 1978, she requested permission from the Soviet authorities to leave the USSR. Seven months later, the permission was granted, and she moved to Israel, settling in Beersheba.
