Samuel Bak’s exquisite paintings remind you of a child’s storybook, albeit a somewhat odd one. The pile of teddy bears, collapsed against a cloudy blue sky canvas resting against a bombed-out building; the haunting start of a forest encroaching on a crumbling Eiffel Tower; the tiny house destroyed, then reborn. His later works shout with color and a peculiar sense of humor.
Samuel Bak: A Retrospective of Seven Decades
$16. Through July 10. Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 5th St S, St. Petersburg. 727-820-0100. flholocaustmuseum.org.
They’re quite a change from his earlier works, showcased alongside the more recent ones in his retrospective at the Florida Holocaust Museum. Those early works more clearly show the horrors inflicted by hatred, fear and violence. Looking at those early works only, you wouldn’t think Bak started life as a happy child in Vilna, born to middle-class Jewish parents in 1933.
“I knew a paradise of a middle-class child of a not-very-religious family, rather secular, thinking the world would be an ongoing paradise, very comfortable,” he says.
When the Germans arrived, the dream changed, to one where he wanted only to survive. He wore a yellow star; Hitler’s army forced his family, along with all the other Jews, into an ancient ghetto. When Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (traveling death squads) arrived in Vilna, the ghettos housed poor Jews; the Einsatzgruppen took those Jews into the forest and murdered them. Next they killed the Jews who couldn’t work.
One in every 40 Jews survived. Samuel and his mother were two. Hitler’s men murdered Bak’s father days before Russians liberated the camp.
Samuel Bak: A Retrospective of Seven Decades
$16. Through July 10. Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 5th St S, St. Petersburg. 727-820-0100. flholocaustmuseum.org.
Bak doesn’t need to talk about the Holocaust today, though: He’s done that over the past 70 years in his paintings and his book, Painted in Words. History and art fans can see a retrospective of his work in St. Pete through July 10. What Bak talks about today is history repeating itself.
As we stroll through a painted history of Bak’s life, he’s quick to point out that genocide doesn’t confine itself to Jews.
“I don’t start with the Nazis; I start with the Bible. When I read in the Bible that Amalek should be destroyed, the women and the children, because they are the enemies of the Jews, I realize that what is being said by the candidates today quotes the Bible and quotes those most shameful parts of the human history, which are in the Bible,” he says. “This goes on. It goes on. You have today Syria and so forth.
“The Jewish Holocaust was this laboratory that was showing the extent of possibilities of human behavior in terrible circumstances. There was nothing unique about it,” he says. “It’s dominate and rule, and to rule you have to divide others. On the television we see how the next elections are being prepared here for this country, and you realize that the basic impulses of the human nature have not been destroyed.”
Donald Trump, who this week won his third presidential primary, will, if elected, attempt to institute a Muslim registry.
“It makes me sick,” Bak says of the registry. “Racism is a very ugly thing, it’s a terrible thing, and it exists. I think that the great enthusiasm with which a not entirely white president has been elected to this country has woken up a lot of racism, and this racism is still knocking on the door.”
He says, too, his paintings cannot change closed minds.
“My paintings are not posters. I think what my paintings do is, they suggest some things, but only to the people who open their eyes and their hearts and they try to bring something of themselves to the paintings. If no one brings anything that resonates with the painting,” he says, “I do not have any illusion about these paintings making any difference.”
He paints, then, not to change minds, but for the collective memory.
“Once we have burned our hand with hot milk, we know next time we will be more careful, but society at large needs certainly much more than that,” he says. “Various people have to bring their experiences into the light and tell others, and the collective starts to evaluate and think about what various memories bring together to a strata of experiences. It’s very important.”
The collective matters to Bak, who also endorses a social democracy.
“I’m not very sure that the Founding Fathers have put it into the recipes of how this country should work, and … I am very bothered by it, that it is not part of what happens here, and I am very bothered by the fact that American mythology is the Western, is the hero on the horse with a gun who sets the law by himself. I do not like the American mythology,” he says.
He doesn't particularly like Hillary Clinton, but he's voting for her.
“It’s a privilege for someone of my generation to be able to see in his family the integration of different races, of different backgrounds, and see how I kind of foresee the world in a thousand years, where there is only one kind of human type, one color,” he say
“I think she is the one who is fit for the job,” he says. “I am not naive. I know that we live within certain realities, very tough realities. We have inherited a lot of problems, we have created a lot of problems we are going to leave over to the generations to come. I am terribly sad when I think of the world my grandchildren inherit, I am terribly sad, but that’s how it is. I’m talking about it in my paintings.”
Despite those problems, despite the horrors of his early life, Bak chooses now to see the beauty.
“I am extremely lucky, in my sense. One of my daughters is married with a Frenchman, a Catholic. One is married to a Senegalese, a very beloved son-in-law. I have two grandchildren that are black.
“It’s a privilege for someone of my generation to be able to see in his family the integration of different races, of different backgrounds, and see how I kind of foresee the world in a thousand years, where there is only one kind of human type, one color,” he says.
“That’s fantastic.”
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2016.