Margarethe, Soshana and Maximilian fled to Switzerland, then Paris, where Fritz had waited for them and finally in 1939 they reached London, where they would stay two years.

Soshana attended the Northwood College and in 1940 the Chelsea Polytechnic School, where she had painting and drawing lessons and learned about fashion design.

In 1941 he managed to get an affidavit for his family and booked three tickets for the S.S. Madura, the last civil ship that would leave Europe.

To earn their living during these travels, they painted writers, musicians, statesmen and scientists like Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodore Dreiser and Hanns Eisler.

[5] Because of Beys' activities within the Communist Party, the couple left the US and spent nine months in Cuba, where Soshana had her first exhibition in 1948 at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Havana.

She became acquainted with the artists Kupka, Auguste Herbin, Ossip Zadkine, César, Pignon, Bazaine, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Alexander Calder, Wifredo Lam, Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Affandi, Lain Bangdel, and Marc Chagall.

She had organised herself an invitation by for a Chinese Ministry of Culture to exhibit in Beijing[12] and on her way to China, she visited India, Thailand, Cambodia and Japan, where became interested in and inspired by Indian philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism.

In a letter written by Gallizio, to his gallerist Otto and Heicke Van de Loo in Munich, he announced '20 paintings were made in September 1959 in Paris, together with Soshana', adding 'results formidable'.

[19] In 1964, Soshana traveled to Mexico for various exhibitions, living many months in Cuernavaca,[20] known as the "City of Eternal Spring" and a refuge for many artists and intellectuals of the 1960s.

[22] During the course of her second trip around the world in 1968, Soshana visited the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Sikkim, Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and Israel.

In 1969, the Chogyal entrusted her with painting portraits of the king and the queen of Sikkim and the same year she became a member of the Theosophical Society.

[25] Soshana knew many people of the New York art scene, like Mark Rothko, Francesco Clemente, Joseph Hirshhorn and her close friend Adolph Gottlieb.

[26] Despite gaining international attention for her work and exhibiting frequently, Soshana felt unsatisfied with her living situation and uncomfortable in New York.

In her early work, Soshana links individual elements from the tradition of Fauvism with the compact, hermetic view of American Realism and is noticeably imbued with a spirit of youthful insouciance.

[28] Soshana received her first lasting artistic influences at an art school in New York City, starting at the age of fourteen.

Her teacher in New York and later husband Beys Afroyim, who was a committed Communist, led her much deeper into narrative art and contemporary Social Realism.

[33] Soshanas working-class milieu studies on the other hand show a high affinity with famous regionalists and socialrealists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, the Soyer Brothers or the Mexican Muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.

In these early paintings, figures are modeled roughly with a few broad brush strokes without any detail; landscapes and citiscapes always open up to the beholder from a slightly elevated point of view.

The scenes appear mostly in a neutral light, with neither houses nor figures casting shadows, yet these landscapes with the saturated application of colors, exude an almost cheerful mood, which can be interpreted as an echo of Fauvism.

[35] Soshana's paintings of European Alpine landscapes, which she began creating upon her return to Vienna in 1951, already show her first steps into Art Informel.

[37] Her Paris paintings are being connected with Abstract Expressionism and compared by experts to those of Jackson Pollock, Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung.

[40] Although she devoted a big part of her work to the abstract art, Soshana never completely gave up the representational and kept interweaving occasional figures into her paintings.

[41] Many of Soshana's paintings contain Surrealistic motives, like an infinite horizon, expanded endless spaces, in which mysterious shapes, masks or heads seem to float.

In 1960 she made her first visit to that country, which was – due to its political antifaschist position - at that time particularly appealing for artists and intellectuals from Europe.

[44] Soshana refined a technique, she once had developed by chance in her Paris studio years before, when it had rained through the leaky glass roof onto her watercolours and dried, leaving bright spots with dark edges.

Soshana began to imitate this effect with turpentine on her oil paintings, the result was a "kind of drip painting in reverse"[45] which resembled the structure of liquid crystal, as she describes herself: "Some biochemists say that my paintings resemble what you see, when you look into a microscope"[46] A lonely figure, a dark silhouette or a single head between heavy bars, surrounded by wild strokes inside the perspective of a tunnel – motives like these run like a red thread through Soshanas whole work and have earned her a reputation as "Cassandra of the canvas, a prophetess of doom, an artist of the Atomic Age, a painter of anxiety and loneliness, of disease and dementia, of unemployment, pain, and death."

During Kurt Waldheim's election campaign in 1987/88, she made a series of paintings and collages, in which she incorporated Nazi propaganda texts.

[52] Soshana worked internationally in U.S., Israel, France, Mexico, South America, India, Japan, China, Africa, etc.

But Soshana understood that she had to develop her own individual, unique artist image and knew very well how to practice successful self-management.

Her encounters with Picasso were told again and again - especially the story of the day, when she visited him in his villa in Vallauris, to be portrayed and the refused his invitation to stay with him.