Art and Life: The Story of Samuel Bak

By Ute Ben Yosef

Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak traces the development of a child prodigy deeply shaped by the catastrophic events of the Shoah, from his early artistic influences to his years in the Vilna Ghetto and Landsberg DP Camp, his formal training in Israel and Paris, and his fruitful art career in Rome, New York, Switzerland, and Boston. Augmenting the rich existing literature on Bak, Art & Life explores—in thoughtful prose and through reproductions of both iconic and rarely seen work created between 1942 and 2022—how he navigated the prevailing art trends of the mid-twentieth century in search of his own pictorial language. It considers the personal, historical, and artistic currents that led Bak, now aged 90, to create an astonishing body of work that bears witness to cataclysmic events, embodies our common humanity of suffering and hope, and poses questions about the repair of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pucker Art Publications
• Release date: Oct 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781879985476

Book preview

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IN THE BEGINNING

ROOTS

To the rare survivors of the Jewish diaspora in Lithuania belongs Samuel Bak, an artist whose distinct metaphorical style expresses the horror, pain, and barbarity of the civilized human race which the middle of the 20th century so brutally exposed. In his own words, My life, from age 1 until age 10 has determined who I became, and nourished all I have painted.¹ Bak, who while these lines are being written is nearing ninety, still retains an unusual memory dating back to age three. He easily revisits places, recalls events, and conjures thoughts and impressions beginning from early childhood. In 2001, he published a memoir in which many such remembrances—heart-wrenching, sad, tragicomical, whimsical, and often magical—were vividly described.²

Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland on August 12, in the fateful year of 1933, to Jonas and Mitsia Bak.³ From his doting grandparents, Rachel and Chayim Bak on his father’s side and Shifra (née Nadel) and Khone Yochel on his mother’s, boundless love was lavished on the sensitive, delicate, impetuous, and brilliant child born with a synesthetic perceptivity, a weak stomach, sensitive bronchial passages, and a heart murmur. From an early age he knew how to twist each member of his exceptionally gifted, charismatic family around his little finger, at times assisted by his nervous cough.⁴ They lovingly called him Samek, the Polish diminutive of his name, to which various pet names were added.

The ominous signs of the current political situation following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany by President von Hindenburg, the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 depriving German Jews of the rights of full citizenship, and the brutal expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany to Poland, were carefully kept away from the child. As his secular parents had absorbed the culture of the Polish majority surrounding them, he was initially sent to a Polish kindergarten. But when he was four years old an incident in the street changed this. Walking home with his mother, a thug spat in his face and shouted "zhid (meaning kike")—an offense outside the range of his vocabulary. He did not grasp the situation, as his mother knelt to comfort him and wipe the spit off his face. But consequently, he was moved to a Yiddish kindergarten to be brought up in his own culture. Initially he felt uprooted and unhappy to be separated from his Polish friends, but gradually he began to feel at home in his new surroundings and became fluent in Yiddish.

His sheltered childhood, with its daily and weekly rituals such as the visits to his grandparents, continued as before and etched itself into his memory, consolidating an archetypal world from which he later drew his iconic images. By the age of three, Samek began to display an amazing gift for drawing. The family saw in him a future painter, which was an unusual attitude for members of the Jewish middle-class milieu at the time.⁵ When it came to literature and art, they spoke to him as to an equal, saturating his young mind with stories and pictures which he devoured with intensity.⁶

EARLY ARTISTIC IMPULSES

Bak’s artistic talent was developed by his mother, who was an artist in her own right.⁷ After graduating from the gymnasium, she attended a private art school in Vilna, where she became an accomplished designer. She specialized in creating scarves and sold them with great success. Her mother, Shifra, was a very resourceful businesswoman and would have preferred Mitsia join her in her thriving fruit and vegetable business (she later worked with her mother as a bookkeeper), but it was a matter of pride for Mitsia to stand on her own feet financially.

Art was a constant presence in their lives. Mitsia commissioned a large fresco for Sam’s room from a fellow student, which he vividly remembers to this day as a landscape with clouds, birds, and some jolly figures.⁸ Another aesthetic impulse came from a vase in his parents’ living room, filled with cubistic flowers forged in Bakelite. The visual experience of this three-dimensional design helped lead the boy to the realization that an object can be a symbol of another reality. At the age of four, he began to be conscious of perspective.

Mitsia owned a color reproduction of a painting of Saint George Slaying the Dragon by Paolo Uccello, a Florentine painter who had stood on the threshold between the medieval concepts of Good and Evil and the newly discovered Renaissance perspective that man is the measure of all things. As the picture was important to her, it had been hauled along to the family’s dacha during holidays. Frightened of it and exhilarated by it at the same time, Sam absorbed the figure of the valiant saint on his rearing horse, piercing the fearsome dragon with his long lance, the helpless lady in distress standing by in Gothic female powerlessness. At night the picture had a habit of coming to life to haunt the impressionable young Samek and had to be carefully covered. In the osmotic process from reality to creativity, the picture became an indelible part of Bak’s earliest visual stimulants. Another prototype of his visual memory was an engraving in the home of his grandparents, Chayim and Rachel, which remained so vivid in his mind’s eye that he could describe it many years later as if standing in front of it:

A whole battle scene is contained in a gilded frame of considerable thickness and is hanging over the bed. The soldiers, their uniforms and the stains of their blood are as grey as the sky over their heads. Bulging grey clouds, which look more like a heavy smoke that has escaped from invisible stacks, float above a darkening horizon. The scene is made out of a myriad of tiny black lines. The beautiful horses, the dying men’s faces, their uniforms as well as all the other details of the picture, are made of fine, tiny stripes. They are engravings, though I do not yet understand the process.⁹

Fragments of this picture appear in Bak’s later paintings, as do the brick walls of the light brown, peeling façade of the building where Chayim and Rachel lived.

One of the hobbies of his weekly visits with Khone and Shifra was paging through a book of portraits of the Russian czars. He was most impressed by the figure of Catherine the Great, who later reincarnated into the haughty, murderous queen in Bak’s chess paintings. The book also contained a reproduction of the painting by Ilya Repin of Ivan The Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November (1581), in which the crazed czar has just murdered his son and holds him in his arms, his face a mask of horror, his eyes the epitome of despair. Years earlier, Khone had taken a detour on his return trip home as a soldier in World War I to view the original painting in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. He later conveyed to Sam his emotional experience of the original and spoke to him about the mysterious chemistry transmitted from a work of art to the soul of the viewer. He said to his grandson, Samounia, you will have to study these secrets when you grow up.¹⁰ Bak would fulfil this mandate; indeed, his paintings have a pulsating life of their own and an inexplicable way of representing a living counterpart to the viewer.

VILNA: JERUSALEM OF THE NORTH

Poland and Lithuania both claimed Vilna after World War I, then Polish forces officially occupied the city in 1920. It was known as the Jerusalem of the North, and with nearly 100,000 Jewish residents (about 45% of the city’s total population), it was a hub of Jewish life and home to a plethora of social, religious, cultural, and scientific organizations. There were vastly diverse affiliations which ranged from a strict Orthodox community with its famous Yeshivot (Talmud academies) to ultra-secular movements, in which the salvation of Jews was envisioned by their assimilation with the Christian culture. Sam’s uncles, Shifra’s sons, attended Hebrew school in the mornings and partook in meetings of the Hashomer Hatzair (the secular Zionist socialist youth movement) in the afternoons. The Bundists constituted another socialist movement, to which Sam’s grandfather Chayim passionately belonged and to which his grandmother Rachel equally passionately and most resolutely did not.¹¹ Vilna also had a Yiddish speaking worker’s movement with a socialist, secularist, anti-Zionist orientation. The intellectual climate was filled with sizzling debate. The Yiddish sector was largely non-religious, its members belonging to the working class.¹² Vilna was also known for its prominent literati, among them the poets Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954) and Avraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) who founded the Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna) literary society. Later, in the Vilna Ghetto, they would become Bak’s gurus and have a fateful impact on his life and art.

The city was endowed with outstanding Jewish educational institutions such as Jewish, Hebrew, and Yiddish practical gymnasiums. Central to its vital cultural ferment was the Strashun Library, founded in 1902 by Mattityahu Strashun. With its vast literary treasures, it became Bak’s spiritual home as soon as he was able to read. He absorbed the literature of western culture from the Greeks to the present, from The Iliad and The Odyssey to writings by the great child educationist Janusz Korczak (pseudonym for Henryk Goldszmit). Bak marveled at the illustrations in Korczak’s children’s books King Matt the First, Kaytek the Wizard, and Little King Matty and the Desert Island, which Korczak wrote in addition to his ground-breaking works on child psychology.

VILNA: CENTER OF FINE ART

During the 19th century, a throbbing creative impulse erupted among the Jews of Eastern Europe against the current of two almost insurmountable impediments. One was the dictate of the Second Commandment: Thou shalt not make for yourself a graven image,¹³ and the second was the fact that Jews were barred from attending art schools and art academies in the notoriously antisemitic Russian Empire.

Despite this situation, Vilna had produced one of the greatest sculptors of the Russian Empire, Mark (Mordechai) Antokolsky. Although he was Jewish, he was allowed to study at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg after the wife of Vilna’s Governor General, who was impressed by his work, introduced him to a Russian baroness she knew. His sculptures were so impressive that he was elected to the Russian Council of the Academy of Arts. Like the painter Ilya Repin, Antokolsky executed portraits of the czars with profound humanism and perception. The czars admired his work and promoted him, causing jealousy among his Russian fellow artists, especially after the horrors of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903.¹⁴ As a result of hostility towards him on the part of Christians—and fellow Jews (for whom his sculptures were not deemed Jewish enough)—Antokolsky went to Paris where he worked and taught until the end of his life. His sculpture Ecce Homo (Behold the Man; 1878) is a statue of Jesus represented as a Jew with payot (sidelocks) and wearing a yarmulke (skull cap). Antokolsky meant to convey with this figure that the persecution of his people was a perversion of Christ’s teachings. The subject of Jesus as a Jew suffering with his people was later taken up by artists such as Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak.¹⁵

One of the few institutions under the time of Russian rule which accepted Jewish art students at the turn of the 20th century was the Vilna School of Drawing, under the directorship of Pyotr Trutnev. Here the students received a thorough art training and were familiarized with both Old Masters and contemporary European art movements. One of its students was Boris Schatz, who later became the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where Bak would one day study.¹⁶ The death of Pyotr Trutnev brought the end of the Vilna School of Drawing, which shut its doors in 1916. The next generation of art students attended the very traditional Vilna Academy of Art, but many, including Bak’s mother, opted for private art education. Bak belongs to the third generation of modern artists from Vilna, but as his formative years fell into a time of cataclysmic upheaval, his development as an artist followed a path of its own.

When her young son, aged four, showed a precocious talent for drawing, Mitsia saw it as her obligation to devote all her creative energy to cultivating his art. She was doubly reassured when his talent was recognized by Shifra’s brother, Arno Nadel, after Shifra sent him some of Bak’s earliest watercolors and pencil drawings. Nadel was a prominent artist and part of the circle of the Berlin Expressionists. He was a playwright, a poet, a musicologist of very high standing, and a composer of sublime synagogue music. Today his compositions are performed in Berlin, specifically in the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue. His paintings echo the style of Arnold Schoenberg’s haunting portraits,¹⁷ some of which embellished Shifra’s walls and echoes of which can be seen in Bak’s early pencil drawings. He replied to Shifra in a handwritten letter: "Do not bother the child with trivia. Leave him alone. For little Samek, it is only KUNST, KUNST und KUNST [ART, ART and ART]. Allow the child to become what he already is."¹⁸

This decree from the great professor shaped the attitude of the family towards the child and Arno Nadel’s advice was followed with rigorous single-mindedness.

DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS

Meanwhile the political situation in Vilna became alarming. In September 1939, Germany launched an unprovoked attack on Poland. Within weeks, victims of a strategy of massive and concentrated surprise attacks termed blitzkrieg (lightning war), the Polish army was defeated and Nazi Germany officially occupied a portion of Poland.¹⁹ Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Eastern Europe, whom he regarded as untermenschen (racially or socially inferior), was formulated later, in 1941. Bak’s home at No. 10 Wilenska Street was inundated with people in need of his father’s dental treatment, telling tales of horror that were verified by broadcasts from the family’s hidden radio. Most of them were on their way to or from Kovno (Kaunas), where the Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara, in disobedience to his official mandate, saved Jewish lives by issuing visas to enable them to flee Europe.

On September 19, 1939, Vilna was occupied by the Red Army. A month later, on October 29, in a baffling political twist, Russia returned Vilna to Lithuania, declaring it as the capital and changing its name from Vilna to Vilnius. Just a few months later, in August 1940, Stalin retracted this move and Lithuania was once again integrated into the USSR. The erection of his giant cast stone statue, with his outstretched hand heroically pointing to a magnificent future, was avidly watched by Sam, who had no inkling of what was actually happening. He had to attend a Russian-run public school in which students were saturated with communist propaganda, but after only one day of this educational brainwashing his mother removed him, claiming his weak bronchial condition as a certifiable excuse.

The citizens of what was now Vilnius endured these political somersaults as best they could and entered survival mode. After a Russian army general confiscated Shifra and Khone’s apartment, the couple came to live with Chayim and Rachel. Their daughter Yetta, who together with her husband and baby Tamara had been living with them, went to the family’s dacha in the countryside. There, they were joined for a while by Sam, who enjoyed this life in nature and got up to his fair share of mischief.

At one point, a Soviet colonel moved into a room in the Bak family home. There were benefits, such as his gifts of rare culinary delicacies in a time of dire food shortages. But he also had an unwelcome eye on Mitsia, which unsettled Jonas and elicited fits of nervous coughing from Sam to interrupt delicate situations. The colonel pulled strings to secure work for Jonas, less as an act of kindness than to get him out of the house. Jonas was appointed head of the Red Army state railway company’s dental services, which meant a decent income and an exquisite uniform, deftly tailored in Chayim’s shop. The Russian colonel was soon transferred, to his great disappointment but everyone else’s relief.

On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression and launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union in pursuit of Lebensraum (a territory sought by a state or nation for its natural development) and with the resolve to render the whole of Eastern Europe Judenrein (cleansed of Jews). The first chords of the Death Fugue were struck and from then on Death, the master from Deutschland,²⁰ was on the march.

In the wake of the army, the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads rounded up Jews in towns and villages, conducting mass shootings and burials in mass graves in forests close to the towns. On June 24, 1941, the Germans occupied Lithuania. From then on, the Jews of Vilna became state-sanctioned fair game. In the process of driving them from their homes into ghettoes and robbing them of their belongings (the servants looting what remained), the Nazis tested the waters, gauging how far they could go in the eyes of the world. When after each atrocity the world showed no reaction, Hitler proceeded to his next move. Bak’s family lived in helpless fear. He was eight years old, still shielded from reality, delighted to be moved to his parents’ bedroom to make room for Jewish refugees. He heard hushed conversations without understanding what was said, still feeling sheltered and secure.

Then suddenly Jonas was imprisoned in a labor camp where he had to cut turf. Soon, real hunger came. At home, facilitated by the family’s Russian housekeeper Xenia, Jonas’ tuxedo was traded for a burlap sack filled with potatoes, an untold luxury by now. A few months remained before the next phase confronted Bak with naked reality, and he explains that …dark clouds were entering my soul, to emerge one day as metaphors in my art. The resulting paintings became a way of blending my personal need for elegy with the eternally difficult question: Why?²¹

THE CATACLYSM

The months leading to the end of 1941 passed in such turmoil that the chronological sequence of events became blurred in hindsight. Horror first unfolded in the month of September 1941. Khone and Chayim were queuing in the street for bread when they were captured by a Lithuanian thug who received 10 rubles for each person he identified as a Jew and delivered to the Nazis to be murdered. Khone, the wonderful, mischievous, imaginative precision mechanic and inventor of original devices, the lover of bird song and music, and Chayim, the socialist intellectual who wanted to make the world a better place, were transported to the edge of a mass grave at the Ponary forest and shot.

At some point Shifra and Rachel were driven to a ghetto in Vilna, known as Ghetto #2, to which mainly elderly Jews were deported. Nothing is known about their circumstances inside the ghetto until October 1, the day of Yom Kippur 1941 (10 Tishrei 5702), when in a conspicuously cynical act by the Nazis, Shifra and Rachel were transferred from Ghetto #2 to the Ponary forest to the edge of one of the several open mass graves and told to undress. There they were shot dead, joining their husbands and tens of thousands of other Jews. Throughout his life, Bak has wondered: Were they together at the end? Did they give each other comfort? Did they die immediately or did they suffer? In his painted memorials to them, he captures the artifacts of his childhood memories connected with each of them.

Utter pandemonium had unfolded in Vilna. Mitsia and Sam had no contact with Jonas, nor with either set of grandparents, and they were unaware of any of their fates. Jews were forced to wear armbands and a yellow star, patched to their clothes. They were forbidden to use the sidewalks. Days were defined by terrible fear, mother and son peering apprehensively through the edge of their curtains. Then it happened: Lithuanian policemen knocked at their door. Sam tucked his beloved teddy bear carefully under a blanket and said goodbye. He never saw the teddy bear again, but it appeared many years later in his art as a metaphor for the children whose lives had been so cruelly interrupted. The teddy bears in his paintings are shrouded and blindfolded to prevent them from seeing the horrific reality around them. Mitsia hurried to his room to pick up his pillow before they were forced outside. It was pouring rain. With thousands of other Jews, they were marched to Vilna Ghetto #1. On the way Sam’s pillow got soaked and became too heavy to carry. Mitsia allowed him to discard it and it was trampled underfoot in the street by the crowd inching forward. In his memory, the pillow became a living shroud, a metaphor for the throng moving towards their destiny within a landscape of indifference.²²

In the ghetto, they were confronted with unimaginable scenes. Crowds of people staggered around, uprooted and bewildered. A wife yelled at her husband because he had forgotten their house keys, as others laughed at this with bitter cynicism. A man hanged himself from a banister in the stairwell. Disruption and chaos filled the overcrowded, narrow walls. Finding a little space on the floor, Mitsia and Sam sank down in their exhaustion and slept.

FLIGHT TO JANINA’S

After a few hours of sleep, Mitsia got up. Mitsia’s survival instinct took over and with Sam in tow she found her way out of the ghetto, walking surreptitiously on the side streets in the direction of the home of Khone’s sister, Aunt Janina. As a teenager, and under unfortunate circumstances, Janina had fled the home of her Jewish employers and been adopted by a pious Roman Catholic couple who had her baptized as a Christian and given her a Catholic upbringing in the Benedictine convent of St. Catherine. She grew up under the loving care of the nuns, and though she later married a prominent Catholic man (a nephew of the Bishop of Warsaw), she resumed contact with her Jewish family.²³ When the refugees arrived at Janina’s house, she immediately took them in. However, the presence of her Jewish family endangered her own life and that of her two sons, so Mitsia and Sam could not stay. Janina took them to her alma mater, the convent of St. Catherine, imploring the Mother Superior to shelter them. The abbess, the righteous Sister Maria Mikulska, and a very small number of nuns in the know put their own lives at risk to protect them. This incredible act of bravery not only went against the decrees of the Nazi occupiers but defied an unwritten ordinance of the Catholic church, reaching up all the way to the taciturn Pope Pius XII, who as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (when Nuncio to Bavaria) had been an ardent admirer of the Führer.

HIDING IN THE BENEDICTINE CONVENT OF ST. CATHERINE

In their hiding place Mitsia and Sam were soon joined by Mitsia’s younger sister, Yetta, her husband Yasha, and finally by Jonas when he managed to escape the labor camp.

The nuns shared their sparse food rations and daily life assumed a routine. Sam’s name was changed to Zygmunt, with the diminutive Zygmus, which sounded less Jewish and more Nordic than Samuel and was thus safer. Aunt Janina performed an emergency baptism under this name—anything to save his life—and Zygmunt was instructed in the Catholic religion by Sister Maria. These lessons remain imprinted in Bak’s memories. (The nuns taught me how to be a good Catholic.)²⁴ They also contributed to his visual enrichment. He was shown a copy of the New Testament illustrated with engravings, which he wrote abounded with images of God, Jesus, the holy virgin, and many saints and martyrs, created by a genius of a Frenchman called Gustave Doré. His wild imaginings, packed with detail and realism, passion and love for the macabre, nourished my impregnable imagination.²⁵

The gruesome detail of a full-figured Jesus after his flagellation, painted on wood and morbidly embellishing the corridor to their hiding place, made a lasting impression on him. He found great solace in the stories about angels, who felt very real to the traumatized child with his recent experiences of deathly fear, violence, and his own powerlessness. They consoled him and he was sure that they would save him. The saints re-emerged much later in Bak’s iconography, such as the figure of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows.

Eight months after they arrived, the Nazis occupied the convent. The family spent three days without food hiding in the ceiling, which they had reached by a trapdoor that Jonas and Yasha had had the foresight to construct. They then made the perilous flight in the freezing cold back to the Vilna Ghetto #1, while the nuns and the priest were taken to a labor camp to endure untold hardships.

RETURN TO THE GHETTO

When asked how he could bear all these horrific experiences, Bak replied that for him, the time was not one uninterrupted sequence of horrors. In fact, his memories of his second stay in the Vilna Ghetto contain some positive interludes. He had a wonderful private teacher, Rokhele Sarovsky, who opened his mind to the world of learning. She introduced him to, and shared his drawings with, the two famous Yiddish poets, Avraham Sutzkever²⁶ and Shmerke Kaczerginski. Initially they could not believe that these drawings could have been made by an 8-year-old boy, but soon they took him under their wings. Kaczerginski, under the administration of an Einsatzleiter (Operations Manager) of Alfred Rosenberg’s, had been assigned to work in the sorting of looted books of Jewish culture. Rosenberg’s operation, named the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), was established by Hitler to seize Jewish cultural properties in the occupied territories.²⁷ Everything of Jewish cultural value was pillaged—art works, books, musical instruments, stamp collections, historical manuscripts, Torah scrolls and their covers, breast plates and crowns. The most precious objects