Читать книгу Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors - Shlomit Editor Kriger - Страница 14

Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Photograph by Andy Abrahamson.

Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), in 1933. He loved to paint from a very young age. During the Holocaust, he and his family moved into the Vilna ghetto. There, at age nine, he held the first exhibition of his paintings. He and his mother managed to escape from the ghetto and sought refuge in a Benedictine convent. By the end of the war, they were the only members of his extensive family who had survived. The Nazis shot his father in July 1944, only a few days before Samuel’s liberation. Samuel and his mother fled to Lodz and then travelled to Germany, where they lived in Displaced Persons camps.

In 1948 they immigrated to Israel. Samuel went on to attend high school and then the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He later served in the Israel Defense Forces. In 1956 he left for Paris to study at École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Subsequently, he lived and exhibited his artwork in Israel, Paris, Rome, New York, and Switzerland. He and his wife then settled in the United States in 1933.

The list of Samuel’s innumerable exhibitions of the last five decades includes a 1978 Retrospective at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, a 2002 Vilnius Picture Gallery retrospective, and a 2006 Yad Vashem show that featured 60 years of his works. In 2002 Indiana University Press published Samuel’s book Painted in Words: A Memoir. In recognition of his numerous achievements, in 2012 he garnered the Terezin Legacy Award from the Terezin Music Foundation, as well as honourary doctorate degrees from the University of New Hampshire and Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania.