Jewish Telegraphic Agency - 12.20.2001

 

Painter who survived Holocaust
has homecoming exhibit in Vilnius

By Adam B. Ellick

VILNIUS, Lithuania, Dec. 20 (JTA) — Samuel Bak never planned to return home.

His last images of his native Vilna — the Yiddish name of Vilnius — come from 1944, when the Lithuanian capital was covered in ruins and incinerated debris.

Bak´s father and grandparents, like 94 percent of Lithuanian Jews, were killed in the Holocaust.

Then 11 years old and already famous among Vilna Jews as a child arts prodigy, Bak escaped with his mother to neighboring Poland before ending up in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany.

In 1948 they immigrated to Israel.

The renowned artist followed a career path that took him to Rome, Paris, New York and Boston, where he lives today with his family.

His paintings — which carry an inescapable theme of destruction — have appeared at the National German Museum, New York City´s Jewish Museum and London´s Barbican Center.

In October Bak published his first book, "Painted in Words: A Memoir," which documents the wartime horrors he lived through.

"I saw the Germans arrive, and I saw a world disappear in minutes like the two towers of the World Trade Center," Bak says. "But my world was transformed much more brutally than the world that we are living in today. We were a Jewish community of 70,000, and on liberation day we were 200."

Until recently, Bak, now 68, had never considered revisiting the horrors of his previous life. But that changed a few years ago, when Bak got word that his childhood artworks had survived nearly six decades of Nazi and Soviet rule.

This spring, Bak overcame what he called "a lot of emotional upheavals" and returned to his birthplace to prepare for a retrospective of his works at the State Art Museum and Gaon Jewish Sate Museum.

Funded by the Lithuanian ministry of culture and Boston´s Pucker Gallery, the four-month exhibition, "Returning Home," runs until Jan. 30.

Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Vilna Ghetto, the exhibit features more than 100 paintings by Bak from 1944 to 2001, as well as newly discovered works from his childhood in the ghetto.

"The commemoration of this sad date is the answer of the modern Lithuanian society to the world: We know our history, we want to be fair and we want to continue the dialogue among civilizations," Lithuania´s culture minister, Roma Dovydeniene, says of the exhibit.

Bak marvels at the change in his fortunes since he was a boy who escaped death.

"To think this boy survived and returned to his native town in Vilnius with a major exhibition that is celebrated by the authorities is — what can I say? — it´s a miraculous experience," Bak says.

His early works, including a sketchbook and a portfolio of more than 65 drawings and watercolors, long were thought lost.

They were discovered in the mid-1990s in the collection of the National Museum of Lithuania by curators at the Gaon Jewish State Museum, a prewar institution reestablished in 1989.

The national museum has since transferred these and many other works to the Jewish museum.

Bak believes these works were hidden by a Vilna poet who survived the war and accumulated Jewish artworks immediately after the Russians liberated Lithuania from the Nazis in 1944.

Bak´s childhood works are displayed at the newly restored Tolerance Center, one of three venues operated by the Gaon museum. The renovated building, a prewar Yiddish theater left in ruins after the fall of Communism in 1991, was unveiled in conjunction with the opening of the Bak exhibition.

His modern works are displayed in eight rooms at the State Art Museum.

"That fact that the authorities were willing to sponsor this is a sign that something is moving in the right direction, to deal with this horrendous past," Bak said during a recent visit to Vilnius.

Before the war, Vilna was the Yiddish cultural capital of the world. The city was dotted with Jewish theaters, libraries, schools and more than 100 synagogues.

"If I had to choose the Metropolitan Museum in New York or an exhibition in Vilnius, I still think I would have chosen Vilnius because here I can show my paintings to my grandparents," said Bak, who donated 37 of his works to the Gaon museum.