Painter Samuel Bak was born in Vilna a few years before the start of World War II. His talent was recognized when he was still a child, and his work was exhibited in the Vilna Ghetto when he was nine years old. He went into hiding with his parents during World War II, but only he and his mother survived. When he immigrated to Israel in 1948, he enrolled at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. Later he lived in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. Many of Bak’s paintings focus on commemoration and memory of the Holocaust, and he is particularly well known for his surrealistic still lifes. He lives in Massachusetts.
Memorial, like many of Bak’s paintings, evokes the ruins incurred by the Holocaust, in this case symbolized by the shards of shattered Jewish tombstones, possibly hinting at the two tablets of law. A…
These nocturnal passenger trains in wartime have their own peculiar sounds. The deportation wagons have a way of screeching, like an eagle or a vulture—whereas this kind of train whines and groans as…
When Arnold Newman was asked by Newsweek magazine to photograph industrialist Alfred Krupp, he initially refused. He was repelled by the idea of photographing a man who had been prosecuted as a war…