Holocaust Awareness Week

Philip N. Backstrom, Jr. Survivor Lecture Series

Samuel Bak 2014

Lori Lefkovitz: I'm Lori Lefkovitz Ruderman, professor of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University. Sorry. Thank you. And as director of the humanities center at Northeastern, I'm in the college of social sciences and humanities which is a cosponsor of the week of Holocaust Awareness Programming. And this year, as you know, the focus is on Art Restitution and Remembrance. I want to thank you for being here this afternoon to learn from Samuel Bak, whose long distinguished career as an artist began when he was nine years old in the in 1942 where he had his first exhibition in the Vilna Ghetto.

Lori Lefkovitz: Having suffered the immense loss of his father and grandparents, Mr. Bak and his mother survived the ghetto's destruction. As an immigrant to the then new state of , Mr. Bak studied at Bezalel Art School in and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in . He has lived and exhibited around the world before settling with his wife, Josie, in Boston in 1993. He has been the subject of 15 books and a film documentary, and in 2001, published a memoir Painted in Words. In 2002, he received the German Herkomer Cultural Prize.

Lori Lefkovitz: In my first weeks at Northeastern University, three and a half years ago, I received a strikingly beautiful welcome gift in the mail from Bernie and Sue Pucker who are here today, of the Pucker Art Gallery on Newbury Street. The gift was the most recent Pucker art publication, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Samuel Bak. And I meant to show it, but I will after. It's just a beautiful book. Bernie Pucker writes in the afterword to the book, and I'm quoting him, “Bak's art derives from his personal experience, immense artistic talent and his need to extend his fundamental questions about the meaning of life in our day.”

Lori Lefkovitz: So before inviting Mr. Bak to the microphone, I do want to encourage you to visit the Pucker Art Gallery which is nearby at 171 Newbury Street; and visit their website to discover more about the work of Samuel Bak, and learn about current exhibitions and events hosted in the gallery. It is my very great privilege right now to both welcome you and introduce Samuel Bak.

Samuel Bak: Thank you. I'm sorry for the people who stand over there because they will see very poorly the projection, so I would advise them maybe to go over there behind in the other places. Well, thank you very much. I must say that I am very impressed to see so many young faces. It doesn't happen to me very often as I speak and there are so many young faces, it's absolutely beautiful. It's very moving because you will see here what I am bringing you is somehow my art, the story of my life.

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Samuel Bak: But I will begin with maybe the way when you go to the movies, they show you first the other films that you will see in the next weeks. So I will show you a few images of an exhibition of mine that will open on April 5th. Right, Bernie? It's April 5th?

Bernie Pucker: Right.

Samuel Bak: On April 5th, and which is somehow dedicated to the image of the cup. Now, why the image of the cup? Because I somehow feel that my cup is really full. But my copy's full of wonderful things of the real gift of having survived where there were so little chances to survive. And it enabled me then, my cup, to collect lots of things. I know that Jesus on the last day of his life praying said,” God, my cup is full,” and He meant my suffering is terrible. And what I loved in the idea of the cup that it means both, my blessings are extraordinary and my suffering is extraordinary.

Samuel Bak: And therefore, because it has this kind of double and contradictory meaning, the cup became, for me, a subject worth trying out and trying to place it in all kinds of situations. So the images that you see here will be the images of the next exhibition, the relationship of an instrument that is supposed to help somebody in something like mixing something in a cup, but can also become an instrument of destruction. And all these ambiguities, these are thoughts that's passing my head and they try to find an expression in my work.

Samuel Bak: As you have seen in the first image of the cup, there is something that looks almost like a volcano. And it just occurred to me today reading the news about the Crimea and the political situation of the world… But thinking of all that and also reading about these very light earthquake in Los Angeles. And I think we really live on a surface of the globe where there are daily, very light earthquakes. And from time to time, one volcano erupts and sometimes a huge volcano erupts so there is a huge destruction. And what can we do about it? We can learn somehow better build the bridges, the houses, but we cannot prevent it.

Samuel Bak: And something of the nature of the volcano is also in the human nature. There is a lot of very bad stuff in the human nature, and when certain conditions mature these bad stuff can do a lot of damage. An illustration for that is . The Holocaust actually, unfortunately, did not teach the world very much because as you all know terrible tragedies continued to happen and continue to happen and will happen. And there's nothing we can do about it but try with our very meager means to help ourselves and mainly hope that things will be controlled.

Samuel Bak: Now, as you see, these are a few images just to give you an appetite to go to the gallery and see my work. I also thought it may be fun for me to just make a photograph of a painting that I'm working on now in my studio and bring my studio to your directly here today. So, this is still of the cup series. It's called, I think, Love in the Air. I like when we have the idea that love is in the air and use

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your imagination. I leave what you can imagine there about love or the making of it. The next one that you see here is a detail of a painting, and if you look well what you see here is the letter H.

Samuel Bak: Now let me just for a moment here adapt my images here to what I'm showing you because… Oh, here. That's okay. Now you can see here there is an H and you can see here an O, an O. You can choose between this O and you have another O. And then you can see the letter P. You can see the letter P. And then if you look well, you can see the letter E. And all these are the details of this one painting. Sorry, I jumped a little. Of this one painting. We choose a painting in a series of paintings that will be an exhibition in October.

Bernie Pucker: [Inaudible 00:09:58].

Samuel Bak: In October of this year. All my hope paintings were the letters that's creates that incredible thing that makes us work, that makes us study, that makes us take on ourselves all kinds of things that we call the hope, that makes us sometimes also do not very nice things. I don't know, like dilute ourselves or whatever. But, anyway, this is just an introduction to my work and give you an idea more or less what kind of painting I am doing. But now let me speak about my life. I am showing you a photograph, a recent photograph, of the city where I was born.

Samuel Bak: This is . It is the capital of . And just to show you now Lithuania, that's Lithuania as it is now before it is becoming occupied by the Russian forces under Mr. Putin. This is the city that I remember from my childhood. Vilnius is an ancient city. It very much has the character of Prague. It is a city that has about 200 beautiful churches and had a huge, huge Jewish population. It had a population of about one third of the city, which was about 80,000 people. And I was born there in 1933 and lived in the house of which some 30 years ago I received a photograph. And that house still stands as it is.

Samuel Bak: And what is most amazing is that in this house, which today belongs to the Ministry of Lithuanian Education, in the room which was my room by some incredible chance, almost unbelievable to believe, teachers are working on the project of teaching the Holocaust to Lithuanian children. So I don't know if such things, unless they happen in reality, can be believed when they are told in fiction. Well, my father. My father was killed by the Germans just one week before the Russian forces occupied Vilnius.

Samuel Bak: The last memory of him that I have was him carrying me hidden in a sack on his shoulder in order to throw me out beyond the barbed wire of the camp. If anyone of you is interested in the stories of my survival or how it happened that I'm here today speaking to you, well, I wrote about it. It was mentioned before in a memoir. It is called Painted in Words and Amazon can help you to find it. Since I've shown you my father, I'm also showing you my mother. There I am. There, I still have no beard so it is very difficult to recognize me but I'm on the shoulder of my mother.

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Samuel Bak: And here, you have another photograph of myself with my grandfather, with my grandfather and here I am about six or seven years of age. This was about a year before the Germans arrived to Vilnius, and one of the very first men killed there was this grandfather of mine. I visited with my own grandson when he was 13, Vilnius, and we went to the same place and that's where I told my grandson all the stories of the family. And I took him, we were there for several days, to the old city or where the ghetto used to be, the old ghetto of other .

Samuel Bak: Now, ghetto today is a word that is used in a negative sense, in a sense as something that limits you, that closes you in, and so on. But the ghetto of Vilnius was actually created in the 14th/15th century when the Jews were given extraordinary conditions of managing their own life, of being able to close in those streets so that in the Shabbat there wouldn't be any disturbances, that no goyim would enter the place, and so on. So ghetto, which began as something of great privilege, through the centuries became what it means today.

Samuel Bak: There are very few Jews who remained in Vilnius. Of the old generation, there is hardly anyone alive. There are about 5,000 Jews today, mostly Russian Jews, living in Vilnius and the city has been very much restored so all these old places look today very, very attractive for the tourism. And there is no sign of the old big famous synagogue which existed there in the ghetto. It was all built up. There was absolutely no place around the synagogue. It was not like St. Peter's in Rome where you have the big Piazza. But, where people used to meet was always inside.

Samuel Bak: Well, now visiting Vilnius before they have really restored it completely, I was able to get into the courtyard of an ancient convent which is in the city, in very center, in which I was hidden with my mother and my father by Benedictine nuns. We were there for a certain number of months but then the convent was taken over by the German authorities, by a certain organization that was headed by a Mr. Rosenberg, whose idea was to collect all the artifacts and all the books of the people, of the groups, that were destined to be destroyed in order to make one day a museum of Hitler's achievements.

Samuel Bak: And that convent was taken over by the Germans and they collected their Jewish books and various Jewish objects in which… And in that place, a group of Jewish intellectuals worked as slave laborers. Among them was maybe the greatest Yiddish poet of the 20th century who died I think a year ago or so who is Avrom Sutzkever. You will see Sutzkever here with his friend, Kocherginsky who was another very famous poet. Both lived in a tiny room in the ghetto and it was on this tiny, tiny balcony that that photograph was made.

Samuel Bak: They actually took interest in my art and organized the first showing of my works in the ghetto when I was eight or nine years of age and I became a kind of a star of the ghetto. I used that pun, the star of the ghetto, because there is a star here and there is also myself who identifies very much with that image of the boy of the Warsaw ghetto that has become such a symbol of the Holocaust. And I will return to it later, to that image, when I show you a little more of my

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work. So as I was saying, Sutzkever was there when we were liberated in ‘44 and this photograph has him and me on his knees.

Samuel Bak: And Sutzkever was actually, I think, the first writer who wrote about me and my work when I was about nine years of age and it was published in Moscow in ‘45 in Yiddish in the book about Vilna published by Sutzkever. Sutzkever and Kocherginsky who were working in this museum of the Jewish artifacts and Jewish books took one of those ancient books and smuggled it into the ghetto and gave it to me and said, “Look, there are in this book empty pages. Why don't you make some drawings on those pages? Because, who knows? Maybe we will survive, maybe not. But the book has good chances to survive.”

Samuel Bak: I did not realize what that meant. At age eight or nine, you cannot imagine what it means to survive or not survive. But I knew what it means to have paper and be able to make on it some drawings. So, I made all kinds of drawings in the ghetto and the book somehow survived and the book was found. And the book was a part of the Lithuanian National Museum, and then it was given over to the Lithuanian Jewish Museum. It is in Vilnius. And an exhibition was made about these book and my drawings inside, and I have here a few of my earliest works.

Samuel Bak: These were done 71 years ago. Here is an image of two characters, a very happy one and a very choleric ones. And I must say, usually, I'm not so full of admiration as I'm supposed to be when looking at my own work. But when I look at these works, it's absolutely beyond me to know how a boy of nine was able to put in that much of energy, that much of variety of signs and that much expression. That, here, I say I don't know how to explain it to you. I did a small sculpture in clay in the ghetto of Moses and this was one of the drawings for the Moses, definitely inspired by a little photograph that I had of the Moses of Michelangelo.

Samuel Bak: Another image from that book is this one. And I must say that when I was nine years of age, I was an avid reader and I read a lot in the library of the ghetto, which was called this [foreign language 22:57] library. And they knew me. I mean, I used to spend there hours. And very quickly at the age of nine, I passed from books written for children to books for adults. And at that time, I read in three languages. I read in Yiddish, I read in Polish and I read in Russian. And one of the books that I admired very much in the ghetto was a book of short stories of Chekhov.

Samuel Bak: And one of the drawings that I did there was very much inspired by story of Chekhov just to tell you that in the ghetto, among all those horrors that we lived, there was a way to escape and books provided me with a fantastic possibility of escaping. Well, as you heard before, I went to , I went to Israel, I developed as an artist and some very heavy memories of that past time began to haunt me. And I tried to create an art which will somehow evoke the kind of destruction and the kind of falling apart of the surface of what we call normality.

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Samuel Bak: And I was very, very much taken by what was in Italy then called as Arte Povera, which was art done with some of very poor means, of discarded materials that the materials and so forth and so on. I will not go into that too much because this is a separate chapter. But what I will tell you is that in the years in which Hitler's famous book, Mein Kampf, was written, a book that was speaking of his ideology, Hitler was serving a prison sentence in a city called . Landsberg am Lech, there were the elections that brought Hitler to power.

Samuel Bak: When there were those elections, the municipality of Landsberg was proud that you gave the highest number of votes to Hitler. And the facade over the municipality was covered entirely with red flags and swastikas on them entirely. Now, many, many, many years later, the museum of Landsberg gave me a show. And in that very same municipality which you see here, and if you can read down you'll see Sam Bak. You'll see ‘welcome Sam Bak'. So many after the swastikas, they have shown their big show for my work.

Samuel Bak: And what was interesting is that they have shown many things that I have painted in Landsberg am Lech in a DP camp between the years ‘45 to ‘48 when I was there. And you have a photograph of myself painting a certain painting that today hangs in my house. Now this one, depicts the streets in the ghetto and here I was already a very mature painter of 13 years of age. And I thought it was important to paint a self-portrait, which I did, that you can see here. And I tried to find for you a photograph of myself at that age, more or less in that light. I could not.

Samuel Bak: But, fortunately, there were such a thing that you call the genes and I found a photograph of my grandson who is now 17, but here he was exactly the age in which I was. And since he looks so very much like me, I decided to include him here in this show. So, here is another one of my images painted there at age 13, age 14. And with that, I will put all of you on the boat that brought me to Palestine. If some of you read the history about the creation of the state of Israel, you maybe have heard the word Exodus. If you haven't heard the word Exodus, there is a movie with Paul Newman called Exodus.

Samuel Bak: It's just a terrible movie, but it still tells the history of that time. And one of the boats that was bringing the refugees was called Pan York. And if you look very, very, very well maybe you will see me there among the people or may be not. But, there I was. When years later I thought about how fate has brought me to that boat, I really wonder if this was a good decision or a bad decision. I don't know. I felt sometimes like I am being a toy, like somebody is playing with a toy or somebody playing with the boat. I made a little painting about boats and so on, which are toys that can be moved around.

Samuel Bak: Well, anyway, let's skip that. And what I'm showing you now is the building which was the place where the independence of Israel was proclaimed by Ben- Gurion in ‘48. And you have here a little girl raising the Jewish flag in this wonderful extraordinary magical moment in which suddenly the Jews have created their own country. At that time, the enthusiasm was limitless and no

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one was able to imagine how with this wonderful thing so many terrible problems will emerge from under the ground and how difficult, and very, very difficult, it will become with time to make this project a viable project.

Samuel Bak: But, anyway, this is a subject apart. I will show you a place where I lived where they were building, putting some houses for survivors. That place was called Yad Eliyahu or [Bitzaron 00:31:07]. And there is a wonderful book by Shavit that has a chapter dedicated to Bitzaron. It's an extraordinary book. It is, maybe, one of the best if not the best books that have been published about Israel. And I very much urge you if you have one day the time to read the things which are not in your curriculum, maybe when you're 60 or 80 years of age, read the chapter of Bitzaron.

Samuel Bak: And from Israel, I have a watercolor I did in a place called Zikhron Ya'akov. I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 and somebody rang at the door and it was the director of that high school. And he came with an envelope and the envelope contained money. And he gave this envelope to my mother and said, “Your boy should go to a place called Zikhron Ya'akov and make some watercolors there during the vacation.” So suddenly I had money and I traveled there and this is one of the watercolors I did when I was 17.

Samuel Bak: When I was a little older, 18, 19, of course I had to do my 30 months of army service and this is a wash that I did in the barracks of the army. It was a terrible place. Oh, I'm sorry. I did not show you that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I have here two things to click, so here we are. Anyway, I'll skip that. I'll skip the time where everybody had to work and work very hard and we were surrounded by building and building and building. And I was surrounded by some other thoughts. I wanted to become a painter. I wanted to study art. I made drawings that, somehow, had to do with the sense of sadness, of allergy that was in me for all the things that I have lost.

Samuel Bak: I think in those years, certainly, my memories of the past have become a kind of a paradise, real or maybe somehow slightly embellished. I don't know. What I know is that I very much wanted to go to Paris. I wanted to go to Paris and here is an image of Paris the way I have painted it when it was, for me, this wonderful idea all built up from bits and pieces of dreams. And these Paris of dreams was, for me, something really embedded into me by my father's father, by my grandfather, who was a Bundist when he was young. A bundist means he was a socialist, and socialist in 1909 so about 100 years ago.

Samuel Bak: And when a revolution failed, he had to escape and he escaped to Paris. And then a few years later, my father was conceived in Paris. But for my grandfather, Paris was always something that he was saying with a ‘aaah', saying, “Paris, Paris.” And for me it was clear since I was age three, four, five, that I will one day end up in Paris. So, here is a photograph of myself with my mother in Paris. I was already a student of two years and my mother came to visit me and we walked along the Seine where all the booking is and looked at some old books.

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Samuel Bak: And after Paris I went to Rome and I became a painter and I was quite successful with my first exhibition. This was a kind of art of semi-abstract character. It evoked, it gave, maybe, some churches of Paris or some tall buildings or… This one is particularly dedicated to the idea of the Tours St. Jacques, Which is some Gothic architecture. But in some of my paintings there were also memories of the places where I had to hide, where I had to be in darkness, where things were very difficult to see and to observe. And there was a lot of pain in my work and the pain was somehow inspired by bits and pieces of photographs of the tragedy that was my past.

Samuel Bak: You have here an image which are the people around a little boy of Warsaw. This is not the little boy of Warsaw but this is the same photograph, and you can maybe see on the bottom his hands here. And I tried to express all this pain in my much more abstract art, which is maybe when I really touched the theme of the Holocaust in the deepest way on the level of my emotions. But I realized you cannot really create art with emotions. You create art in a very kind of cool way. You must have control over it and you create it in order to communicate, in order to create a language that others will understand, that you will be able to tell them something.

Samuel Bak: And that was the moment in ‘64/‘65 when the American pop artists suddenly introduced into the world of abstract art the objects of everyday life. One of the very famous ones was . I just brought you to show a little Andy Warhol of that time, which has still something in it of the very kinds of emotional moving graphism. And since objects became suddenly kosher, I decided to take up the visual world and inspired by the Renaissance, by this invention of a non-existing reality that the Renaissance painters had, I started to paint objects, fruits and so on.

Samuel Bak: And my art in about one year transformed itself to something which is a language that endures until these very day. The pear. Why the pear? People asked me so many times why the pear. I answer it so many different answers that I don't even remember what the pear means anymore. Fortunately, there is a wonderful book about my pear paintings written by Lawrence Langer. So whoever of you wants to know what the pear means and so on, look up this book of Lawrence Langer and he will tell you everything even more than you ever wanted to know.

Samuel Bak: The pears goes on; and the pear, again, carries in itself of course the symbols and the remains of a world that was. And then, the human figure. The human figure. I looked with great admiration at the work of the Renaissance artists. There is a painting of a couple, a couple in which the man and the woman face each other like in these two paintings of mine. They're both silhouettes that in case of a projection can create on the wall a shadow of something that may be the result of a reality. And here, I don't want to drag you into the Platonic philosophy and the parable of the cave and so on. You have teachers who will talk to you about that.

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Samuel Bak: I have painted a large painting, which is like a family gathering of people in various degrees of existence. I have also a few details of that painting. That painting actually was then the subject of a film that was produced by the UNESCO for the German Television. I think it was on in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately, I never found a copy of that film. I don't know. But, the painting is there. The painting exists. So, lets me go through still lifes. The still lifes as you can see have become, again, very much a recreation of life for me.

Samuel Bak: And I did not bring here many other examples of the still lifes because I knew that I'll have to look at my watch. And I knew the by four o'clock, more or less, I was told we have to have some questions and answers, so I'm trying to be within the reach of my time. Still lives. A still life in art is usually an excuse for showing the brilliance of the artist and as still lives went on through very realistic depictions to be also the subjects and the reason of Cubist art. But, for me, the still life was also a symbol that represented the family and the friends of survivors.

Samuel Bak: Because the families among whom I lived were all people or families who were made whole again from bits and pieces. I mean, here I was with my mother. My mother married a man who lost his wife and his two daughters in a camp. The people pretended that everything was alright and we can work and we can earn a living and we can enjoy things. At the same time, the same people would scream at night, wake up in the middle of the night because of nightmares, would feel always incomplete, always guilty for some reason why they have survived, why they were not able to pass on to their children that passed and so on and so forth.

Samuel Bak: It was a world made out of bits and pieces. And so this world somehow became, for me, the basis for so many still life paintings that I have done. But let's now go back to the boy of Warsaw. This is certainly the most famous photographs of all the photographs of the Holocaust, and for a very good reason. First of all, it incredibly well, if one can say, composed photographs, this boy all alone surrounded by people in sheer panic with a soldier aiming at him a gun. And maybe that soldier has somewhere at home a boy exactly the same age. We don't know. We do not even know if that boy survived.

Samuel Bak: There were at least three or four people who claimed to be that boy. And not knowing doesn't matter because I can assure you that I was exactly that same age. I look exactly the same way. I had such a coat. Always my knees were open to whatever conditions of the weather because a little boy wouldn't wear long pants and I very much identified with this boy. And since this boy became such a symbol of the million and a half of children that were assassinated by the Nazis, I dedicated to the good number of my works to this boy.

Samuel Bak: And this is one of them, which somehow represents a kind of a garden maybe where people are trying to create a monument to that boy. But as monuments go, monuments fall apart and the memory of things does not always last eternally because… And this, we know why. We know because history is

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something that is constantly recreated. There is never such a thing that changes as much as history does. And it is very often falling apart for that reason or another reason. The boy is, as I told you, the subjects of many works. In one of these paintings, as you can see, caries in itself also the emblem of the crucifixion.

Samuel Bak: But that big cross, this kind of not cross by the letter X, is something that is somewhere also embedded in me very, very, very strongly because it must have been more or less. We try to figure it out. A week before my father was gunned down in the camp and I was at that time hidden in a place with a few more Jews with my mother, we were trying to be as silent as possible and we slept on the ground. And suddenly I remember in the middle of the night, my mother jumped up and I whispered in her ear, “What is it? What is it?” And she said, “Oh my.”

Samuel Bak: She whispered into my ear, “I just woke up from a terrible nightmare. I saw your father with a big X on him, and that X on him makes me think that I will never see him again.” And that X actually appear in many, many of my paintings. It is a kind of a remnant of memories of that time. Here is a watercolor of the same subject, of the boy. And here are the shoes, the pile of shoes, that remains. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're very, very good as you have let me see because I can somehow lose myself here between those two computers. Okay. So here, as I said, here is that the boy and this picture here is the last one of the series of the boys.

Samuel Bak: In the next one, there is a painting I painted more or less at the same time I painted the family. It's called something, The Garden of Experiments or something.

Bernie Pucker: Experiments in wisdom.

Samuel Bak: Experiments in wisdom. Experiments in wisdom. Yeah. And it is based, as you can see, on the Garden of Eden, on the wisdom of it all, on the apple that was tasted, on the radio which maybe brings to us God's voice, and all these enormous questions that have remained buried in me after I survived, after I was privileged to be among the 200 Jews of Vilna that were in Vilna on the day in which we were liberated by the Russian army. 200 people of a community of 80,000 people. With time, some others arrived on the whole.

Samuel Bak: There were about 2000 Jews of Vilna that survived, which means one on every 40. And I am among the lucky ones. I am among them. So, again, the Garden of Eden was the basis of these paintings, was the basis of the paintings about Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, I think it was [Gans] who, when I had this exhibition, wrote ‘Michelangelo meets Magritte', something like that. There is a whole book that was mentioned before. It was mentioned before, if you are interested in that.

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Samuel Bak: Now when I arrived to Landsberg one of the very first things I did is, because I always had this crazy attraction for books, at that time I was already 13, I went to see, in the old city of Landsberg if they have some books that they are selling. And I found a book with some reproductions of work of a German artist, Durer. Durer was born and lived in Nuremberg, which is only about 40 miles from Landsberg. And Durer was a child prodigy. And Durer, when he was 14 or 15, did the portrait of himself with the pillows. Now, I won't tell you the story of the pillow now but a pillow was very important in my life.

Samuel Bak: I somehow found an affinity with Durer through that book and followed Durer very, very, very much throughout the years, painting many paintings that were based on some of his works. One of his most famous works is this engraving called The Melancholia and I have exploited this Durer painting in numerable paintings. One of them that I painted in 1880 in Paris is this one. I looked for one that is quite close to the engraving but still has some elements. You see there was, in the… Where are we? Just at the moment. In here you'll see there is a rainbow.

Samuel Bak: There is also a rainbow in my painting, but my rainbow is a manmade painting, my promise that there will not be at catastrophe. It's a very manmade promise. I mean, it is certainly in the hands of men to prevent catastrophes. I told you before about my book in which I try to tell my memories, the memories of my family, and also speak a little about my art. The jacket of the book uses a painting of mine, which is these painting here, in which I try to depict my mother. My mother and her, actually, two husbands.

Samuel Bak: One husband, my father who is here, who is buried forever and the other husband, my very dear stepfather, Nathan, the one who lost his two daughters in a concentration camp, the one who was a fantastic chess player and to whom I dedicated my paintings based on chess. The man for whom my mother cared for two or three years when he was slowly, slowly dying, sinking into the ground through an unforgiving Alzheimer. And somehow these two forms of going away, one at the age of 36 very fast through a bullet that goes through your heart and the other one very, very, very, very slowly.

Samuel Bak: So, I will show you a few more of my paintings. Here is this elegant lady who tries to use the Star of David that she must wear as an ornament. Here are the trees of Ponary. Ponary is the place where all the Jews that were executed, that were killed in Vilna or Vilnius, were buried. And today there is a beautiful woods. In my eyes, these trees lift up from the ground and they let the tombs come up from the ground and tell us here it is a huge, huge cemetery. And this one is the last of my series of paintings that I've brought to you here, which was a jacket of a book of Yitzhak Arad who was the head of the in Jerusalem, the museum Yad Vashem.

Samuel Bak: He wrote a book, which was his PhD, on the destruction of the ghetto of Vilna and he asked me to use that painting that I painted to New York. And, for me, this was this kind of very cold and frozen world that was there, while in the

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midst of it a terrible hole was sinking into the ground, this hole in the shape of the Star of David. And in that hole, sank all these people like my parents and their friends. Some of these friends I found on the internet and I don't remember their names, but I remember their faces.

Samuel Bak: And this is their happy photograph which I want you to keep in mind thinking that these were the people who about a year later have ended under the ground in Ponary. So here I, more or less, gave you an idea of my painting, of my work, and I guess that you may have, maybe, a few questions. In terms of time, it's four o'clock. I'm almost like a professional here in terms of timing. Here we are, so I don't know how we proceed.

Lori Lefkovitz: First, we thank you.

Samuel Bak: Thank you. Thank you.

Lori Lefkovitz: Extraordinary. And Mr. Bak has graciously agreed to take your questions. You can fill them yourself, I think.

Samuel Bak: Mm-Hmm [Affirmative].

Lori Lefkovitz: Don't be shy.

Samuel Bak: I don't know. Is there a microphone?

Lori Lefkovitz: There is. There is, and we'll pass it round.

Samuel Bak: Okay.

Speaker 4: All right, I'll jump right in. No one's asking questions, so I'll ask the question. Your early work as a child had this wonderful freedom and looseness to it in how you used the pen and how you used the paintbrush. And I noticed that as your work developed, it became very precise and in my mind almost too realistic. So I'd love a comment to that-

Samuel Bak: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: -how [inaudible 01:00:02]. Do you ever want to go back to that stuff?

Samuel Bak: There is a lot of freedom in my drawings even today, but the things which are easy to me do not interest me that much. Actually, first of all, I am very lucky. Not many artists have something like 71 or 72 years of looking back into what they have done. But I had always a very great ease, a very great facility, with things and things that are easy and things which have become the expression of freedom and then a short time after that became the established academic style never interested me. So when I returned to these things that were very controlled and so on, this was in order to protest against the access of freedom.

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Samuel Bak: But this is really not an issue for me. I have produced so much that I think that I have expressed by myself in every field sufficiently. And besides that, as you said, you were right. There was this word, surrealism, as my work sometimes can see this kind of surrealistic. What that surrealism mean is, again, a very kind of difficult word because the surrealism as a word used in art history doesn't mean at all the painting like Salvador Dali. Because then you have a painter like Miro who is considered by many an abstract painter. He considered himself a surrealist.

Samuel Bak: But surrealism very often in general deals with the world of the subconscious, the worlds of dreams, the world of imagination. My painting does not deal with the world of imagination. It deals with metaphors, it deals with symbols of some very precise things that are very much related to the reality in which we live or which I see. So, I have no problem with the word surrealism.

Speaker 5: I know I'm far, so maybe I'll just project my voice.

Samuel Bak: Yes.

Speaker 5: I love that you just mentioned the symbolism in a lot of your paintings and two in particular that you mentioned, the X which was from your mom's dream and we didn't really look at many of the chess pieces but I've seen your work with the chess pieces as symbols. And my question was about who inspired that. And I guess it's your stepfather. What are some other common symbols that you use as metaphors in your paintings and who inspired them?

Samuel Bak: Oh, yes. I'm using lots of symbols that the limitations of time simply made it impossible to bring here and to show you. For instance, the key has been very often an object in my paintings. And the key is for me, again a very important object besides, as all of you know, it opens the door which is in itself already something. I mean, all that you do here in this university for a good number of months or years is actually a key that is going to open to you the doors of your futures.

Samuel Bak: But the key is also, for instance, an object that in a Jewish Sephardic families was being passed on from one generation to another generation, the key of the house in Spain, from the house from which the Jews were exposed in the 15th century. So the key is something like that. And the key, for me, is a very personal remembrance of the first day in the ghetto. The key. And I remember being in that small room. We were so many people there, there was hardly any place to sit. And a couple started to fight about who is responsible there from the house from which they were exposed. They forgot to take out the key from the door.

Samuel Bak: The incongruity and the tragedy of all that, because what they were speaking about was a very logical thing but in these circumstances it was completely, let's say, surrealistic. So the key, again, is one of those things that appear in my

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painting. There are very many objects. I mean, there is always a good reason why I use something. You have seen the cup, for instance, which you will be able to see, which is a show that is going to come. It's always something that I have used throughout the year. Throughout the years, I always come back and do again and again things that I have done before.

Samuel Bak: Because finally I think at most every writer has two or three books to write in his life and he can write 30 or 60 in various variations. Every musician has a few tunes, can write a lot of music and every painter has just a few paintings to paint but he can do them so many times and in so many different forms. And this is, I think, what is nourishing. Yes.

Speaker 6: It was very [inaudible] of you to show the picture of independence hall. I think people know that that is the art museum.

Samuel Bak: Sorry, the picture of? The picture?

Speaker 6: When you showed the photograph of independence hall. And we know that was the art museum before and it makes me think how important art was to people in these shoes before the state and in the early years of the state. So, please tell us about what it felt to be creating art when people had to spend so much time doing all the hard work of building a new society.

Samuel Bak: Well I can tell you it was a very frustrating feeling. It was a very frustrating feeling. It is a subject of a very long lecture about art in Israel and how it developed. But let's say that many objects of art and some artists, important ones, arrived when they had to fly to Europe in the ‘30s and there was a certain group of artists who could hardly make a living as artists. Some of them became teachers. This was how I became a pupil of a famous Jewish artist called Yakov Steinhardt. In the early ‘50s, there was a very enthusiastic mood in Israel about building the best human society of all time that ever existed in history.

Samuel Bak: The founders of the core of the Jewish society, that had an ideology of a Jewish society, were these young men and women that came before the first world war had created or after created the kibbutzim. They were all inspired by Tolstoy. He was actually one of the most inspiring personalities in the creation of that imaginary Israel of which today, unfortunately, nothing remains. And art in the early ‘50s was a kind of a often luxury. It was it kind of a luxury that we were not supposed to afford, so if you went to an art school, what you had to do is learn practical things.

Samuel Bak: And art was kind of indulging in your own weaknesses. This is why when I was in Israel, all I knew that I have to do is put aside money to go one day to Paris because I knew that in that country I will not be able to dedicate my time to art. And because I had this incredible ease in doing reproductions, illustrations, in doing all kinds of things, symbols for companies, logos. I did even political cartoons for two different newspapers that had two different ideologies in

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order to make some money to be able to leave all that and go one day to that city that I thought was a temple of art, where art was taken seriously and so on and so forth.

Samuel Bak: I mean, I had the imagination and mentality of a young man. But Israel in those years was a very, very, very difficult time and the only possibility of art was doing an art that was very socially significant; that was something that was uplifting, that was happy, that was orientalistic. Well, anyway, it was in that respect as seeing the change itself very much with the years to come. And I would say that mostly in the ‘60s, some Israeli started to go abroad. They brought back to Israel art magazines and there was an enormous stir among Israeli artists to look what is being done in the world, and suddenly to look at what be done in the world not as necessarily inferior to what is being done in Israel.

Samuel Bak: Because you cannot imagine the thoughts of arrogance that was embedded in us in the late '40 and early ‘50s. Today, it is absolutely scary to me when I think that I survived all that. But that's how it was. This was a world of victims. This was a world that had to rebuild itself. It cannot be judged with today's way of looking or thinking. Cannot. As we all know, very often abusers are children that were abused. And what has happened, unfortunately, in the history of Israel is that it is still paying a very heavy price to what Hitler has taken on himself. A terrible, terrible price of that destruction that took [inaudible 01:12:30], which of course the people are fighting against.

Samuel Bak: But unfortunately things are, in this respect, very difficult. On the other hand in Israel with the years with a certain economical boom, with the creation of a certain population that has means, has money and as today inspired by what happens here in the , the cultivation of the gap between the rich and the poor is enormous. I mean, Israel has even soup kitchens, which were something that no one could have imagined years ago. There is today a market for Israeli artists and there are some Israeli artists that can make a living as artists. So, I just gave you a very short cut through the story of Israeli art.

Speaker 7: I'd like to go back to that first art exhibition of yours at the age of nine in the ghetto, which I think is such a powerful image for all of us. And I meant to ask you about what it meant to put that exhibition up in the ghetto, both practically and sort of more generally. And I guess also just more broadly about the role of art in the life of the ghetto in ghetto society.

Samuel Bak: Yes. Well, Vilna was a cultural center for a huge Jewish population. I would say that the Vilna was the center for something like a population of about three million people, three million Jews, who were very literate, who read. The population of people reading in the Jewish world was extraordinary and Vilna was a center for writers, poets, also for religious studies. But, there was a very large secular population. I do not think that the plastic arts in Vilna were as developed as the art of the word or music. There were choirs. There were orchestra. There were musicians. Music was very important.

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Samuel Bak: And in the ghetto, when you think of a population of 80,000 people, the ghetto contained about 19,000 or 18,000, people still had the needs to produce art, to play music. There were jazz concerts in the ghetto. There were choirs. There was a Hebrew choir and the Yiddish choir. There was a theater. And I remember when there was this exhibition in the ghetto, it was in the little foyer of the theater in the ghetto and I went with my parents. I went with my parents through that exhibition where there were about 25 of my drawings exhibited there on the walls.

Samuel Bak: And the entrance to that exhibition space was from inside the ghetto, of course, because the main entrance remain outside of the ghetto. So you had to cross the courtyard of what was called the Judenrat, the administration of the ghetto. And on the ground of that rudnicka number six, there were people that were brought from a small ghetto that was liquidated a few days and there were people on the ground and they had not eaten. They were covered by mud. They were like really a kind of a mountain of breathing of rugs. By the way, I have shown you before a painting where I was kind of inspired, let's say inspired if you can use this word, this memory.

Samuel Bak: And I remember clinging to the hands of my father and my mother and looking at these people and somehow feeling that feeling bad, feeling somehow very, very strange. At the same time, I knew that I was considered special. I was not like any one of the other boys. I was called the little Mozart. I didn't know who Mozart was, but I knew that I was a little Mozart. And the privilege that I was so very special was then why when I say I do not want to have my head shaved, absolutely not. And since I did not have my head shaved, which means that it will be the place for lice, I wasn't allowed to go to the school.

Samuel Bak: And my mother saying, “Of course, he won't to go to the school.” So I was permitted not to go to this school because I was I. So to answer your question with a personal memory of those days is what I remember. Very mixed feelings. On the other hand, there were artists and a few of the works of these artists even remained. And it was absolutely incredible how art was important for the people theater. In the ghetto of Vilna, the theater was attracting so many people. There was never ever one empty chair. Because I was who I was then, I had to start a free admittance to the theater, so I saw many, many of their shows.

Samuel Bak: This was a way of escaping. It was very, very important. I think that the of art, mainly music, was extremely important in the ghetto.

Speaker 8: Can you tell us in the short form the story of your survival?

Samuel Bak: No, I'm afraid that it's still complicated and it's too long. And it is also good that you asked me because then I can tell you all of you go to Amazon, click on Painted in Words. Don't buy the Kindle version because it's incredibly expensive… incredibly expensive. I don't know if there any new paper available, but you can find them in used books and that's what I can say. And I think it's a

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good book. I think so. It was translated into German, into Polish, into Lithuanian, and there is a French translation. So, here we are. Yes.

Speaker 9: Thanks. First of all, I want to thank you so much for your presentation. I imagine it takes great strength to be willing to open your mind up and allow people look inside, which is what your paintings really are doing for your audience. And I, personally when I was looking through your art, was very moved and felt feelings of sadness and frustration and anger. And I'm curious about what your emotional experience is while creating this art. Is it cathartic? Is it infuriating? Do you know what you've created until you've stepped back?

Speaker 9: I'm curious about the emotional experience of creating something so magnificent yet so sorrowful, and sometimes hopeful. And my other question, short question, is who is your art for? Who do you want to see your art?

Samuel Bak: These are two very, very good questions. First of all, let me start from the second, for whom do I paint? I think I paint always just for one person that is in front of my painting. For that person. That person can be so different. And I paint for the ones who bring an open mind to my paintings, who look, who try to bring something from themselves, who are not there just with an open mouth and tell me, “Oh, put in.”' I want to interact with people I want to connect. I paint for many, many, many, many reasons. For many reasons.

Samuel Bak: It is on one hand the sheer of physical pleasure of dealing with pain, of marking signs on a surface, of magically creating an illusion of something that doesn't exist that makes you believe that you might be able to get into it and travel. It's a challenge. It is a thing that answers a sense of curiosity, because after I begin the painting and I'm in the very beginning of the painting the painting starts to tell me what to do; and I become more and more and more riveted to that thing and curious to know what is there, what will it be and so on. It's not very different from what many writers experience.

Samuel Bak: Once they start to write a book and they create a few characters, these characters can do certain things, cannot do other things. They start to tell them what is possible, what is impossible. The same goes on in art and there is this curiosity. There is enormous curiosity which is a drive. Personally, this privilege with my work is used by Facing History and Ourselves, for instance, that is teaching so many teachers who teach so many, many, many, many children the history of the Holocaust and they use my paintings. And I know that my paintings serve a fantastic purpose of being part of what we call our collective memory.

Samuel Bak: Because I think that there is, maybe, no other laboratory of human behavior that is more acute, that is more dramatic, that is more tragic and more significant to what goes on every day in the world of today than the story of the Holocaust. How did it happen that somebody was able to organize Olympic Games, [inaudible] in '36, and after that killed the Jews, take the Sudetenland

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and no one said anything, take Crimea and no one does anything? I mean, all this is part of the Holocaust.

Samuel Bak: The Holocaust is not only the specific tragedy of the annihilation of the Jews, but it is something that has a background, that has a story before and a story after. And we live in that. And to know that my work can serve somehow the awakening of young people is extremely important to me, is an incredible privilege. Believe me, it's a much greater privilege than to know that someone, thinks that that painting's colors will go so well with upholstery in the living room.

Lori Lefkovitz: I must say that hearing you speak about your life, your art and your ideas in relationship to this period of history is an enormous privilege for us. And this week has been dedicated, as we have a week every year to Holocaust Awareness, an unfathomably deep subject with unfathomably endless resonance. Our focus this year has been on remembrance art and restitution, and this presentation today fit perfectly in with the intention of deepening our questions and deepening our experience. I would like to encourage everyone who can to come to the final program, which is tomorrow at 05:30, a showing of the documentary, The Rape of Europa.

Lori Lefkovitz: It is the original documentary story of the Hollywood Monuments men. I understand, I haven't seen it myself, that it is actually a very, very interesting film. The Rape of Europa, it's at 05:30 in the Kabral Center and it will be followed by a discussion. We also want to draw your attention to the fact that on Tuesday, April 1st at 07:30, you will have received flyers. Seven members of the Israeli Knesset will be here for a town hall meeting. I hope you try to attend and encourage others to attend that as well. And, finally, please join me in thanking Samuel Bak.

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