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 Vilna Ghetto 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 Israel, Mr. Bak studied at Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 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. Page 1 of 18 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. 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 Page 2 of 18 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 Vilnius. It is the capital of Lithuania. 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.