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THE HOLOCAUST PAINTER WHO FOUND HIS SOUTH AFRICAN FAMILY
Cape Times (South Africa)
November 14, 2013 Thursday
IN 1943 a 10-year-old boy was smuggled out of a Nazi forced labour
camp in a sack of sawdust and sheltered in a Benedictine convent
until the Russians liberated Lithuania a year later.
Samuel Bak, then already an exceptionally talented artist, went on
to become revered as possibly the greatest living painter of the
Holocaust. I met him on Sunday night. Now 80, a slightly-built modest
man, bearded and bespectacled, he looked a most unlikely creator of
the large and powerful images that surrounded us in the Jewish Museum
where he is holding his first-ever South African exhibition.
His work has been exhibited all over the world. It was my old
schoolmate Robert Kaplan, chairman of the museum, who went to New York
and persuaded him to bring a representative sample of nearly 70 years'
of painting to Cape Town.
"He didn't need much persuasion," Robert told me. "He discovered he
had about 50 relatives here whom he had never met. They're the Back
family, who had added a C to their name."
And it was the family's Backsberg wine that we were drinking that
evening.
Both sets of grandparents and Bak's father were among the 100 000
people shot by the Nazis in the Ponary Forest just outside Vilna,
Lithuania. Only his mother survived. And it was his mother who made
him read a book about the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks
in the early 20th century - to prove to her son that man's inhumanity
to man was a universal phenomenon, and not just restricted to their
own Jewish catastrophe.
"I felt I just had to tell you that story," he confessed to the
gathering. It helped him to universalise his artistic approach to
human suffering, particularised by the Holocaust.
"I paint quickly, much more quickly than I write," he said when we
were introduced.
"I'm sure you write more quickly than any writer could paint like you,"
I quipped, looking round at his compelling canvases.
He was referring to his memoir Painted in Words, the writing of which
he described as a cathartic experience. It was completed in 2000 and
led to his being invited back to Vilna for the first time since he
had left his birthplace. While there the nun who had saved his and
his mother's life, Sister Maria Mikulska, was specially honoured.
As all who have attended art exhibition openings well know, they are
also great occasions for socialising - "be careful with that drink,
dear, you don't want to spill it all over the picture". Thus it was
good to see Jenny Rabinowitz again, a very talented woman in her
own right but who was first overshadowed by her late husband Hyme,
the renowned potter, and is now best known as the mother of that
wonderful comic actor, Nik.
And a man with an astonishing memory whom I first met only a week
ago walking round the Wynberg Boys' High School sports fields and who
seemed to remember every column in which I've mentioned my school-going
days, was also at the opening. This time he told me which cinemas my
father had managed. I couldn't believe it.
He's Dr Raphael Lacob, a psychiatrist. I was in no doubt he had me
totally psychoanalysed.
But for once it was the paintings that remained the dominating
presence, making us all ask sombre questions about ourselves.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Cape Times (South Africa)
November 14, 2013 Thursday
IN 1943 a 10-year-old boy was smuggled out of a Nazi forced labour
camp in a sack of sawdust and sheltered in a Benedictine convent
until the Russians liberated Lithuania a year later.
Samuel Bak, then already an exceptionally talented artist, went on
to become revered as possibly the greatest living painter of the
Holocaust. I met him on Sunday night. Now 80, a slightly-built modest
man, bearded and bespectacled, he looked a most unlikely creator of
the large and powerful images that surrounded us in the Jewish Museum
where he is holding his first-ever South African exhibition.
His work has been exhibited all over the world. It was my old
schoolmate Robert Kaplan, chairman of the museum, who went to New York
and persuaded him to bring a representative sample of nearly 70 years'
of painting to Cape Town.
"He didn't need much persuasion," Robert told me. "He discovered he
had about 50 relatives here whom he had never met. They're the Back
family, who had added a C to their name."
And it was the family's Backsberg wine that we were drinking that
evening.
Both sets of grandparents and Bak's father were among the 100 000
people shot by the Nazis in the Ponary Forest just outside Vilna,
Lithuania. Only his mother survived. And it was his mother who made
him read a book about the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks
in the early 20th century - to prove to her son that man's inhumanity
to man was a universal phenomenon, and not just restricted to their
own Jewish catastrophe.
"I felt I just had to tell you that story," he confessed to the
gathering. It helped him to universalise his artistic approach to
human suffering, particularised by the Holocaust.
"I paint quickly, much more quickly than I write," he said when we
were introduced.
"I'm sure you write more quickly than any writer could paint like you,"
I quipped, looking round at his compelling canvases.
He was referring to his memoir Painted in Words, the writing of which
he described as a cathartic experience. It was completed in 2000 and
led to his being invited back to Vilna for the first time since he
had left his birthplace. While there the nun who had saved his and
his mother's life, Sister Maria Mikulska, was specially honoured.
As all who have attended art exhibition openings well know, they are
also great occasions for socialising - "be careful with that drink,
dear, you don't want to spill it all over the picture". Thus it was
good to see Jenny Rabinowitz again, a very talented woman in her
own right but who was first overshadowed by her late husband Hyme,
the renowned potter, and is now best known as the mother of that
wonderful comic actor, Nik.
And a man with an astonishing memory whom I first met only a week
ago walking round the Wynberg Boys' High School sports fields and who
seemed to remember every column in which I've mentioned my school-going
days, was also at the opening. This time he told me which cinemas my
father had managed. I couldn't believe it.
He's Dr Raphael Lacob, a psychiatrist. I was in no doubt he had me
totally psychoanalysed.
But for once it was the paintings that remained the dominating
presence, making us all ask sombre questions about ourselves.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress