Samuel Bak

Samuel Bak was born in 1933 in Vilnius

Samuel Bak was born in Vilnius on August 12, 1933, to a secular Jewish family. His talent for art was noticed in childhood. In 1941 he and his family were sent to the Vilna Ghetto, where he showed his paintings for the first time at age 9.

In 1943 he took part in an exhibition in the ghetto organized by the poets Avrom Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski. He and his mother hid in a Benedictine convent until the end of the war. His father was shot by the Germans in July 1944, and only Bak and his mother survived from the family.

From 1945 to 1948 they lived in displaced persons camps in Germany, mostly at Landsberg, and Bak studied painting in Munich. In 1948 they immigrated to Israel. He studied at Bezalel in 1952, served in the IDF, and later studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

From 1959 to 1966 he lived in Italy, where he developed his personal style under the influence of Northern Renaissance art and surrealism. His work deals with the Holocaust through allegory and metaphor rather than direct scenes of death. After the Six-Day War he published an album of drawings called War Drawings.

He lived in Israel, New York, France and Switzerland before moving to Massachusetts in 1993 with his wife Josee. He returned to Vilnius in 2001 for the first time since his youth. In 2006 Yad Vashem opened a retrospective of 115 of his works.