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Oral history interview with Samuel Bak

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2018.541.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0997

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    Oral history interview with Samuel Bak
    Transcript
    Up and down for anything unless--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    And actually, you can.
    Because we don't edit, if there's a noise that you hear,
    if the phone rings, if for any reason we--
    this is how we usually work.
    Why we ask.
    We break because this is raw footage.
    You got it.
    All right.
    Go ahead and roll when you're ready, Ken.
    Recording.
    All right.
    Stand by.
    Any time you're ready.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Samuel Bak on December 4, 2018
    in Western Massachusetts in his studio.
    Thank you very, very much Mr. Bak
    for agreeing to speak with us today.
    You're welcome.
    To share some of your life experiences, and also
    your extraordinary art.
    We will talk about both.
    Thank you.
    I will start from the very beginning with the most
    simplest questions.
    And from there, we'll build our story, our discussion.
    So the first one is, could you tell me the date of your birth?
    I was born on August 12, 1933.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius.
    It's a city that's already the number of the name it
    has indicates how many times it passed from one country
    to another country.
    Now it is, of course, known as Vilnius,
    the capital of Lithuania.
    Yeah.
    And the first two were--
    Vilna is Yiddish for the city, and Wilno is Polish, I believe.
    Wilno is Polish, yes.
    And when I was born, that's the language and the citizenship I
    had in '33 because between 1920 and 1940, Vilnius was Polish.
    Yes.
    And you anticipated one of my questions,
    and that is what language you spoke at home.
    And it would have been Polish?
    I was in one of those families where
    several languages were spoken.
    So my mother tongue was Polish and Russian.
    And then when I was about four, I learned Yiddish.
    So these were the three languages I grew up with.
    OK.
    And your name at birth, was it the same as it is today?
    Yes.
    Well, I was born a couple of days
    after the death of my mother's grandfather
    who was called Shmuel.
    So this is why I was called Samuel, which then in our home
    became Samek.
    And yes, so that's the name I have, never questioned.
    OK.
    Tell me a little bit about your family--
    your father, your mother, their stories as far as relatives
    that you knew in those first years of childhood.
    So let's start with your father, what was his name
    Jonas.
    Jonas.
    Jonas Bak, yes.
    He was a dental technician.
    He was very much specialized in creating dentures
    that looked very natural.
    Because people at that time had very crooked and missing teeth
    sometimes, and so on.
    And when they order dentures, the dentures
    would look like a fence of a garden.
    So the people-- the more sophisticated people
    wanted to have dentures that looked like their own teeth.
    So that's when my father became very successful
    because he was kind of doing creative work,
    making dentures of crooked and yellow and stained teeth.
    What were his materials?
    What did he use to make them, do you know?
    Porcelain.
    Porcelain, he used porcelain.
    Yeah.
    When I was a child, I remember, because a part of our apartment
    was my father's lab.
    He had a few assistants.
    And they had those small electric furnaces
    where they were creating these individually made teeth
    to fit the dentures that would then
    go into the people's mouth.
    So you would never think of that, but of course people
    needed dentures.
    Of course people needed dentures,
    because in those times it was before the antibiotics
    and so on.
    Being liberated from all the teeth
    that were sometimes a danger to the heart or whatever and so on
    was quite a common thing.
    So sometimes quite young people had dentures.
    Besides the fact that we also had sometimes
    film stars of the Polish cinema coming to our home
    where they had all the natural teeth taken out
    and had special dentures made quite beautifully
    so that they would have lovely smiles.
    [LAUGHS] So I lived with all that.
    Were there any particular stars that you were impressed with?
    I don't remember that.
    I mean, I was all my life very much interested in cinema
    and so on.
    But I must say, when I reached out into my memories
    when I was about three or four years of age,
    all I remember that I was sometimes allowed
    in the lab of my father's teeth making and play around a little
    with the tools.
    Oh, that would have been fun.
    Yeah, it was fun.
    What kind of a personality did he have?
    My father?
    My father was, I must say, a very good-looking man.
    He was a notorious womanizer.
    My mother was hearing stories about him and answering people.
    You know, she would say it's so much better
    to be a partner in a good business
    than to have a poor business all to yourself.
    Well, they were very loving and a very devoted couple
    if you put aside the question of sexual fidelity.
    And this was a kind of I would say a middle class
    Jewish secular family of Vilnius or Vilna,
    which I would say about half of the city was made off.
    Oh, there was a huge Jewish population that was very poor.
    I also think that the years between the two wars in Poland
    were not easy years.
    But of course, I, as a child, I did not feel that pressure.
    I did not feel specifically the antisemitism because my parents
    my grandparents tried to create for me a kind
    of a paradise for a child.
    So everything was wonderful and everything was great
    and everything was beautiful and everyone was good.
    And you were the only one?
    And I was-- yes, I was an only child in my parents' life.
    And I was the first grandson of my two grandparents,
    my two couples of grandparents.
    So somehow, I really had the best
    of the most wonderful world.
    Well, it was very special, too.
    And tell me, what part of Vilna did you live in?
    Oh, we lived very much in the center of the city--
    very much in the center of the city.
    We lived opposite a big church, St. Catherine's church.
    There was also the big Benedictine convent
    in that church.
    And it was just across of the little statue
    of the Polish composer, Moniuszko.
    He was a famous composer of operas.
    And I remember playing around on this little square.
    And even today, when I go back to Vilnius
    and I come to that place, it feels that the last 80
    years have passed very quickly.
    The house where I lived, it belongs now
    to the Ministry of Education.
    So of my apartment, there is nothing left the way it was.
    The whole space was kind of emptied.
    There's a long corridor and many, many rooms of offices
    and so on.
    But that's how it is.
    So that is close-- that is very, very close, if not in the Old
    Town, I believe.
    It's in the Old Town, yeah, yeah.
    Near Castle Street, perhaps?
    It is on Wilenska street or Vilnius Gatvė today.
    And what with the address be?
    Do you remember?
    The address then was number 10.
    Now, I think it's a different number
    because since various buildings were bombed and so on
    and they have rebuilt, the numbering changed.
    But what I remember very well is that it
    was on the corner of Zeligowski street.
    And Zeligowski was a very famous Polish general
    who tore away Vilnius from Lithuania
    and gave it back to the Poles.
    Yes, he's not a very popular man.
    So he's not a very popular name in Lithuania.
    So I remember that when the Lithuanians arrived to Vilnius,
    the very first thing they did was
    tear off the name on my street.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And I was wondering why.
    And my parents tried to explain to me, but I don't know.
    I don't remember if I really got it.
    Well, for a child, it doesn't matter.
    These things are just stories.
    Tell me a little bit about your mother.
    Well, my mother is--
    What was her name?
    My mother's name was Mitya.
    Mitya?
    Mitya.
    That sounds like a nickname.
    No, it was her name.
    It was her name?
    Mitya.
    Mitya, OK.
    Yeah, Mitya was her name.
    Yeah, it sounds like a nickname.
    But it was her name, Mitya.
    And she was what you call a modern woman.
    She had always to work.
    She had to work.
    So I used to have a nanny.
    They had a cook at home and so on.
    She was always very well-dressed.
    She was she was very smart.
    Always very, very respected by people for her wisdom
    and so on.
    And had a great sense of humor.
    And later on, of course, in wartime and so on,
    was a woman of an incredible courage.
    And I mean, I'm speaking here as a survivor of the Holocaust.
    And I have this incredible privilege
    of being one of 40 that in Vilnius remained alive--
    one of 40.
    40?
    One of 40, yeah.
    From the ghetto?
    One of 40 of the community of Vilnius.
    That's huge.
    I mean, that is a huge community and a small number.
    I mean, there was a community of about 80,000 people.
    And at the end of the war, we met.
    We were about 200 later and others came.
    So about 2,000 Jews from Vilna remained alive
    of a community of 80,000.
    So this gives you an idea how fortunate
    I consider myself today.
    But you know, like every survivor--
    I mean, I owe my survival certainly not because
    of things that I could undertake as a child or a young boy,
    but very much because it so happened
    that I had a combination of various elements.
    One is sheer luck.
    One is incredible courage of the people around me.
    And help of people who were ready to sacrifice
    their life in order to save me.
    So all these things kind of remain a certain weight
    in one's consciousness when you are then
    even given a long life.
    Have you felt it as a weight?
    Excuse me?
    Have you felt it as a weight?
    Yes, of course.
    I mean, I think being a survivor of that very special history,
    is not a very simple thing, of course.
    I mean, it is also because it has
    been so much researched and so much codified
    and we know so much about it.
    And then we learn with time, actually where we came from,
    what was the scene, and so on.
    Things we didn't know while the things were happening.
    So it is like--
    I mean, I feel today and I'm extremely moved for instance
    when I watch on the television the refugees who
    come to the border of the United States.
    They don't know today what goes on in this country.
    They don't know about the political games here,
    about the exploitation of power-thirsty people
    who make of them victims.
    They don't know it.
    They will, maybe.
    If they survive, they will learn about it.
    And then when in years to come, they
    will tell about these difficult times,
    they will be able to put it into a larger picture.
    And this is what happened to me as a child
    in the time of the events in which we're in a ghetto
    and so on.
    The larger picture came with time.
    And the larger picture also affects somehow
    the memory of things.
    I mean, human memory is not like a computer
    where you click on a button and a folder comes back.
    Memories always a recreation and memory
    is always affected by so many things.
    And since in the technique of living and surviving
    the daily life in this world, forgetting
    is a very indispensable thing.
    You cannot live all the time remembering everything--
    impossible.
    So when you have to go back to these very hard times,
    these very tragic times and so on,
    and mainly when you are conscious about the fact
    that you are among those lucky ones that had the lottery
    ticket for being still around, of course it creates a weight.
    Inevitable.
    OK.
    Well, as you were talking about memory and forgetting,
    I recalled even the title of Kundera's novel, The Book
    of Laughter and Forgetting.
    And that played in his work as well.
    And in his inner dilemmas that he
    needed to address in some way.
    Let's go back to the story a bit.
    So your mother sounds like quite an extraordinary woman,
    as does your father.
    He sounds like a very extraordinary man.
    Yeah, he was.
    My father, he was very athletic.
    He was a gymnast.
    This helped him at a certain moment,
    for instance, to save our lives.
    The fact that he was able to hang
    by his hand to climb on incredible structures
    and so on.
    And to take us out from some place to another.
    I mean, he was certainly capable of doing things
    in a quite unusual way.
    And it's contributed to saving me.
    What were his manner towards you?
    That question applies to both of them.
    Was he involved in your life?
    Very much so.
    Very much so, yes.
    I think that I was a very beloved child.
    I was, I think, quite conscious of how much I was loved.
    And I might have also been sometimes
    quite a manipulative brat, using my charm
    and so on to get what I wanted.
    Well, if it's done in a charming way, then brat doesn't apply.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    But I know that when I think today
    what my grandparents had to endure,
    it's really quite unimaginable.
    In my father's parents' house, for instance, I
    was playing a sea captain.
    To be a sea captain, I needed a boat.
    To have a boat, I had to dismantle part of their sofa
    and put it on the floor.
    And then for their parquet to become the sea,
    it was important to pour some water on the parquet.
    Now, my grandmother would say you cannot put water
    on the parquet.
    So I was telling her, but my other grandmother
    lets me do it.
    Which was a lie.
    So she would pour water on the parquet to make me happy.
    So I mean, ridiculous things that I would have never endured
    from my own children.
    But this gives you an idea how spoiled I was.
    Well, yes.
    And how much they loved you.
    How special you were to them.
    And I think that this fact of being so incredibly
    loved, unconditionally loved has also
    contributed in me the sense of maybe a love of life
    and survival and getting somehow--
    becoming functional in later years and so on.
    And even, I would say, having a certain success with my art.
    I don't know.
    I mean, I will not play here the game
    of being my own psychoanalyst.
    But it is--
    I, too, do not have that background.
    But when I speak with people who at a very young age
    have this thrown into their lives--
    you know, this complete annihilation.
    This force of complete annihilation--
    and they survive it.
    The ones who are able to have a life afterwards often credit it
    was because they have something strong before.
    Of course.
    Something core before.
    Of course.
    I mean, you have certainly the experience
    of interviewing survivors.
    Yes, yes.
    And there is always an attitude, I would say,
    of stereotyping survivors in the general idea of people
    as people that are kind of marked by a given experience,
    so they must be like this or like that.
    But very often, people forget that
    the ones who were thrown into these frightening years,
    tragic years, where people of very different makes
    and very different characters and very different
    personalities.
    And so the same events did not play out
    on each one in the same way.
    Which is why even though one knows the factual story,
    the individual story stays fascinating each time.
    It's different.
    Interesting and important each time.
    Absolutely, absolutely.
    It is that particular aspect of it that nobody chose.
    And yet, this population that in any other way
    would have been a random population.
    In this case, it's an identified targeted population.
    But that's the only thing that is common.
    Personalities are different.
    Ages are different.
    Backgrounds are different.
    Of course.
    All of that, all of that.
    Let's talk a little bit about family history.
    Were your parents and grandparents always from Vilna,
    or had they come from somewhere else?
    That's the generation-- let's go to the generation
    of my father's parents.
    They were from Vilna.
    I have no idea where their family came from.
    I suppose they must have been Lithuanian Jews.
    I think that the grandparents of my father
    had something to do with commerce of wood.
    My grandfather-- my father's father, Haim, was a Bundist.
    He was a socialist in the end of the 19th century.
    And when there was the revolution against the czar
    in 1905 and so very many socialists and revolutionaries
    were arrested, he escaped when the police
    was banging on the door through the roofs of the house
    to the railway station.
    And hid in the first train that was leaving the station.
    And so he arrived to Paris.
    And in Paris, he was just looking for a job.
    And found a job cleaning a shop of a Jewish tailor.
    So I guess that he must've been from what's probably
    a relatively well-to-do family because he was a student,
    he did not really--
    I mean, to be a socialist, you have
    to be very rich or very poor.
    And since the family of my grandfather
    was able somehow to corrupt some officials
    and make his papers disappear from the police station,
    I guess that they must have had means.
    But I don't know much about them.
    Was his last name also Bak?
    Yeah, yeah.
    His name was Bak.
    And so he and my grandmother opened a salon for dresses
    and suits for men, which was called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And it was really quite an incredible story.
    They had quite a lot of success until the First World War.
    And then my grandmother was sick with what they
    called then the Spanish flu.
    And she survived it.
    She survived it, but losing completely
    the sense of taste and odor.
    And then she stopped also working.
    But my grandfather continued with the salon.
    We had a couple of tailors that worked for him.
    He didn't know by himself.
    This means back in Vilna?
    In Vilna, yeah.
    So he had that.
    He was a very good-looking man, always very elegantly dressed
    and so on.
    So he was this kind of director of the thing.
    And on the side of my mother, the family was [Yochel?].
    My grandmother, my mother's mother,
    was a brilliant businesswoman.
    She inherited a small vegetable and fruit shop.
    And then with some 10 associates of owners of other shops
    and so on created what was called a [NON-ENGLISH]..
    A company that was importing, exporting vegetables,
    fruits, and so on.
    So she was she was a very, very smart woman.
    And she was actually the breadwinner of the family,
    allowing her husband who had a passion for invention to invent
    all kinds of unnecessary machines.
    And I think that I had a lot of fun writing
    about all that in my book.
    There is this book called Painted in Words that I wrote,
    I think, about 20 years ago, and so on,
    where I described all these heroes of my life.
    And the memories I wrote much more than one
    could find in the book today, but even that book
    is 500 pages long.
    But they were all part of your world.
    Oh, yes.
    Absolutely they were part of my world, absolutely.
    And the family, I take it then, was not a religious family.
    Well, my grandmother was somehow religious.
    My grandmother was somehow religious.
    Your mother's mother?
    My mother's mother.
    My grandfather-- no, not at all.
    My grandfather was-- my grandmother
    managed to get my grandfather once a year in a synagogue.
    It was on Yom Kippur.
    And my grandfather would take me to the great synagogue
    of Vilnius on Yom Kippur and people
    would be praying under the praying shawl.
    And he always found a way of sitting next to someone
    with whom he was able to share jokes.
    And they were usually shaking, laughing with these jokes--
    During services?
    During services.
    And my grandmother from above from the women's balcony,
    was looking at these prayer shawl of her husband,
    was shaking, shaking there and she
    thought that he was praying with a great devotion.
    So this was one of the secrets that I
    shared with my grandfather.
    I shared with each one of my grandparents, I shared secrets.
    For instance, I had--
    I suffered as a child of bronchitis.
    So the doctor said I should never, ever eat ice cream.
    So I would buy ice cream.
    But I knew that when I buy ice cream I have to bring it home,
    they will put it to warm it up, and I will drink it.
    This was ice cream.
    But with my mother's mother, I had this secret.
    She was buying me real ice cream,
    and I was eating real, cold ice cream.
    And so I knew that ice cream is not something that you drink
    but is something that you lick.
    But anyway, I had a secret with her.
    With each one of my grandparents I had some secret.
    Oh, I can't think of anything that would appeal to a child
    more than having a secret like that.
    Oh, absolutely.
    I was going to ask you, which of all of these people
    had the greatest sense of humor?
    Because I see a sense of humor coming through here.
    Oh, I think all of them.
    All of them.
    I must say all of them had an incredible humor.
    Yes, yes.
    And I think that there is also something in the--
    I would say, special quality of the Litvaks.
    Of that generation of people who survived horrors.
    Where, if you do not have a sense of humor,
    you would fall into a depression.
    Humor was very necessary.
    Humor was very necessary also in the ghetto.
    I mean, I don't know if there is a lot being
    spoken or researched about humor in a time of the Holocaust.
    But I remember, for instance, I asked white people
    in the ghetto they'd meet their friends and they say, "Hello,
    [NON-ENGLISH],, which means "Hello, dead ones."
    [LAUGHTER]
    But well, that's a chapter by itself.
    But you know, I'm going to go in territory here that has
    so many other ramifications.
    But during the Soviet years, the Soviet joke
    became a refined art form.
    Yes, absolutely.
    And it was something that both kept people alive--
    and they were funny.
    They were very funny.
    I absolutely agree.
    Actually, I am not sure that there is
    such a thing as Jewish humor.
    I think there is humor of oppressed people.
    I think the Czech humor and Jewish humor are very similar.
    So yes, I think humor is one of those very necessary medicines
    to take in hard times.
    Absolutely.
    Yeah, and sort of like grown and fostered
    during not-so-hard times so that you can call on it.
    Yeah, absolutely.
    Let's go back a little bit to your story, then.
    So you live in this nice apartment
    in the old town of Vilna.
    Your father has this fascinating laboratory.
    What work did your mother do?
    My mother worked in the accounting department
    of her mother's job.
    So she was a bookkeeper.
    She was a bookkeeper.
    Yeah.
    Actually, she started in an art school.
    She had a very great ability in the field of design and so on.
    And she was very smart.
    But it was very difficult to be admitted to the university.
    She wanted to study law.
    But for a Jewish woman-- already for a Jew
    there, were numerous classes that allowed only 10%
    of the university to have Jews in a city where about 40%
    was Jewish population.
    You're talking about the Stefan Batory University?
    Yeah, the Stefan Batory University.
    Of course, this was true across Poland.
    But it would have been this university.
    Yeah, it was the Stefan Batory.
    So it was very difficult, so she gave it up.
    And she did that.
    OK.
    Did either of your parents have siblings?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes, my mother had two brothers and one sister.
    And my father had a brother who was older, older than he was.
    And who moved in the '20s to Russia
    because he was a very devoted communist and trotskyist.
    And then he ended up, of course, in the gulags.
    For being a trotskyist?
    That will do it.
    Yeah, that was a risk.
    And a sister named Selah.
    And Selah perished in the Babi Yar.
    And you knew them all except the trotskyist?
    I did not know the older brother of my father, no.
    But yeah, Aunt Selah and Aunt Yetta
    there was always this kind of big competition between them.
    Each one of them told me that she was the only one
    present at my birth.
    So there we go.
    But the name of the older brother--
    what was his first name?
    David.
    David, David.
    OK, what happened?
    When did your life change?
    Well, my life changed quite gradually.
    I mean, it started with refugees from Poland arriving.
    People that my father knew in Warsaw and so on.
    So I had to give up my room.
    And I had to sleep in my parents' bedroom, which
    was which was rather fun.
    And we had all the time people, various people
    coming and staying with us.
    Many of them waited for visas that they
    were hoping to get from the Japanese consul, Sugihara
    in Kaunas.
    So this means-- does this mean when the city was already
    back to Lithuania?
    Yeah, the agreement between Stalin and Hitler fell apart.
    Poland was partly invaded by Russia, partly invaded
    by the Germans.
    Excuse me, I'm going to do something I shouldn't, but I'm
    going to correct you.
    The agreement didn't fall apart.
    It came together.
    It was when Poland and was allowed--
    the agreement allowed them to invade.
    Yeah, yeah.
    No, I mean it fell apart when the war started.
    That's right.
    Of course, of course.
    Yeah, so they started--
    they divided Poland between themselves.
    So there's some people who escaped from Warsaw--
    I mean, these were times that I remember I liked very much.
    And then when the Russians arrived, for instance,
    they kicked out my mother's parents from their house
    because the house was kind of "nationalized"
    and was taken over by a Russian general.
    And my two couples of grandparents lived together.
    So I had four of them together.
    So actually, in the beginning I thought
    that war is a wonderful thing because it
    makes so many things happen.
    Life interesting.
    Yeah, and life is more interesting as well.
    But then, very soon the war started.
    And the bomb fell that destroyed the building
    opposite our house.
    And then somehow things became quite frightening.
    What happened?
    Well, for instance, the war started.
    And the building-- a bomb fell just next to our a building.
    Destroyed their three or four floors.
    Killed a little girl, whom I kind of vaguely knew,
    remembered.
    My father was among the men who were trying to dig out
    of the wounded from that place.
    Found the body of the girl without a head.
    They were looking for the head.
    And so all these stories kind of brought the reality to me.
    There were bombardments.
    We had to hide in the cellar.
    Now, each one of the apartments in the building where we lived
    had a quite spacious cellar.
    But ours was so packed with all kinds of goods and preserves
    and so on for difficult times that
    might come one day that there was no place for us.
    So some of our neighbors took us in.
    And there was this old lady who was--
    I think she lived next to our apartment.
    And she was sitting there trembling
    with a log of wood in her arms as if it was a baby.
    And then my mother whispered in my ear, you know,
    she knows what she's doing because all her jewels are
    in that log.
    So I mean, this is the time where
    the Russians were going through apartments
    and confiscated jewelry.
    And so I mean, the war brought to me
    all kinds of images of unusual things.
    Had you started to draw already?
    Oh, yes, yes.
    When I was three my grandmother--
    my grandmother had a brother who was very famous in Berlin.
    His name was Arno Nadel.
    He was, for instance, the editor of music of the Encyclopedia
    Judaica.
    He was the inspector of Jewish music education in Berlin.
    He was the conductor of the choir of the big synagogue.
    He was a poet, quite published poet and with another name.
    And he was quite a good painter.
    My grandmother had several of his etchings hanging
    in her living room, which was her pride.
    And I knew she hated them.
    She just could not look at them.
    She thought because they were expressionistic
    and she thought that her brother makes everyone look very ugly.
    But it was her brother.
    He was a very famous man.
    And so anyway, she sent drawings of mine
    that I did at age three.
    And Uncle Arno sent her a letter saying,
    this letter is for you and for all the family.
    Don't bother this poor child with anything.
    But give him only kunst, kunst, und kunst.
    Means art, art, and art.
    Art, art, and art.
    So which means that the great authority of my great uncle
    decided that I was an artist when
    I was about three years of age.
    And you had never met him?
    No, I have never met him.
    Unfortunately, he perished in Auschwitz.
    And went with my mother, we arrived in '45
    to Berlin looking for him because my mother hoped
    that he might survive.
    He wasn't there.
    But his diaries were saved by a friend of his,
    a famous artist called Kathe Kollwitz.
    Oh, my goodness.
    They were friends?
    Kathe Kollwitz?
    They were friends, yes, yes.
    I love her art.
    Oh yeah, absolutely.
    She's a great, great artist.
    Amazing human and everything.
    She caught expression in such ways.
    And he was-- actually, it's a very, very strange story
    because he was the head of the slave labor unit
    that was collecting the books in Berlin of the Rosenberg, Alfred
    Rosenberg organization.
    Really?
    And when I came to the museum, to the museum in Berlin,
    the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and I came to the room,
    to one of the rooms where there was
    a huge portrait of Arno Nadel.
    Excuse me, I'm interrupting here.
    Tell the story, but then I need you to spell his name.
    Arno Nadel.
    Nadal.
    Like needle?
    Yeah, N-A-D-E-L.
    And not first name, Arno?
    Arno.
    Arno.
    Arno.
    A-R-N-O.
    Yeah.
    OK, sorry.
    And then you came to the room in Berlin?
    And I was kind of completely frozen
    by this huge head of my grandmother looking at me.
    And actually, it was a portrait of her brother
    who looked very much like herself
    that was in this dark room illuminated from behind.
    You know, it was on a kind of a film, with some of his writings
    on the wall and so on about how he felt.
    Oh, my goodness.
    Yeah, so he actually made it that I had to be a painter.
    I mean, this is what the family considered me.
    And I was never given the choice of another profession.
    Was he right, in retrospect?
    Well, I guess so, yeah.
    Yeah.
    Because if you had a pull for someplace else, something else.
    I was a kind of a child prodigy in the field of painting
    because at age five or six, I have already
    done all kinds of things trying to understand how perspective
    works.
    Things which are not what children usually do.
    No.
    No. and then I saw in the ghetto when
    I was nine years of age, the two poets, Sutzkever
    and Kaczerginski.
    They were very much interested in my drawings and so on.
    Had me exhibit about 20 of my works.
    In the ghetto?
    In the ghetto, yeah.
    Well, this is something I wanted to ask you more about.
    Yes, and today in the museum in Vilnius today,
    there is a wing of the Jewish Museum
    that is called the Bak museum.
    They have some of these works that I've done in the ghetto.
    Oh, my goodness.
    Yeah.
    I know that the museum opened--
    A year ago.
    A year ago.
    So that would have been 2017?
    Yes.
    '16? '17?
    Yes, on November 16 or so.
    Because on the day of the opening of the museum,
    a year later I had here from the studio over Skype
    a connection with the museum.
    Many people came and they wanted to speak with me and so on.
    So this is something we do about once a month.
    They have me on Skype interacting
    with people in the museum who want to talk to me and so on.
    They have me there on a large screen.
    How interesting.
    I have the pleasure of seeing that I
    can travel like this without having to take suitcases along.
    But also how your art is speaking to people
    who hadn't seen it until 2017.
    Right, right.
    And forging a connection to your art, but also to the history.
    Oh, absolutely.
    I mean, it's more easy to forge a connection to my art
    because my art is not graphic or frightening and so on.
    And this is something of which I am quite conscious.
    Because I still--
    I'm not a decorative painter, but I still
    want people to look at my art and not
    give them equivalents of photographs
    of Auschwitz or Treblinka.
    But through my art, people certainly
    learn something about my past and so on.
    So in that museum, there are several screens
    in the rooms that are dedicated to my work that
    have me tell the stories of my past and so on.
    And they also tell the story of the Jewish community.
    And now, I mean, I am a kind of an asset for the Lithuanians
    who have now a kind of a longing for what Vilnius once was.
    So the last time I was in Vilnius,
    I was of course received by the president and was knighted.
    [LAUGHS] And I was received by the rector of the university
    where my mother could not be.
    Well, it changed hands a little bit, but yes.
    And I have met everyone.
    The Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
    the Speaker of the House has a special meeting for me.
    The Mayor of Vilnius also.
    I mean, I was kind of playing the role of Samuel Bak.
    So how is that different from Samuel Bak?
    It is different because--
    How?
    Tell me how.
    I mean, in order to survive, in order
    to be able to watch the news on television in the evening
    and not die of a heart attack, you
    have somehow to distance yourself a little from events.
    So I say, OK, this is very good.
    This is very important.
    It reassures me that what I'm doing has some value and so on.
    But it does not compare to the pleasure
    that I have to enter this room where
    I spend every day many, many hours doing the work that I
    really love or being with myself,
    whom I really know I'm not the kind of official person
    or the person that is being photographed.
    So I don't know.
    My mother was always telling me because I
    was this kind of child prodigy and very gifted young man,
    she was telling me in Yiddish, mein kind.
    She was saying, [YIDDISH].
    Which means, my child, don't be a pompous ass.
    And this is kind of an order that I'm trying to stick to.
    So in other words, when you get this recognition,
    you don't want to take it too seriously.
    Is that what you're saying?
    No, I don't take it too--
    I mean, I take it with a certain degree of pleasure.
    And I understand the importance of the thing.
    And I'm not cynical about it.
    But I know that I remain as mortal as before.
    And I know that I will not be sitting on one of the clouds
    looking down and kvelling of my memory.
    [LAUGHTER]
    OK, that gives me a sense of the expansion.
    I mean, were there thoughts?
    Did you have to think about going back, whether this
    would have been Lithuania?
    It was very difficult for me to return to Vilnius
    for the first time.
    I returned to Vilnius after 56 years.
    So this would have been what year?
    Well, we left in '45.
    And I returned actually to Vilnius with--
    I think it was in May.
    It was before 9/11.
    So 2001, before 9/11.
    Yeah, that's when I returned.
    And actually, here is the stories like that.
    I think that I managed to escape from Vilnius
    by really kind of a miracle.
    Because in '44, we were liberated by the Russian army
    in '44 in July.
    And then later on, I met the famous Yiddish poet,
    Peretz Markish.
    Who was among the poets assassinated in '54
    by Stalin, who eliminated a big number of Jewish intelligentsia
    and writers.
    In the anti-Jewish campaign and so on?
    The famous--
    Doctor's plot?
    It was on the day of my birthday, on August 12.
    That was the assassination of a big number of Mikhoels,
    the famous actor and so on.
    Peretz Markish had a Lenin order.
    And through Peretz Markish and so on,
    they assigned me a place in a very special school in Moscow
    for children geniuses.
    Which means children who are very brilliant in mathematics
    or in music or in whatever.
    Very special school that are being taken
    care of and where all their potential
    is exploited to the maximum.
    And of course, this, for my mother,
    was a very scary thing because she was about to lose me.
    And I was the only one, the only thing that she had.
    My father was killed just a few days
    before the Russians arrived.
    He was shot in Ponary.
    And the parents, my grandparents were shot and so on.
    And I was the only man of my mother.
    So it was not so simple.
    It was not so simple.
    So we had to escape.
    And we could not escape because my mother started
    as a charwoman in a shop that was delivering goods
    to the Lithuanian or Soviet nomenclatura in Vilnius.
    And very quickly, they realized she's a smart woman.
    She's a certified bookkeeper and so on.
    And she became the second to the director of that shop.
    And see, the director was very much mixed in black market
    business and so on.
    So my mother was supposed to be the witness
    to do some inquiry that was happening about her boss.
    And she had the order not to leave Vilnius.
    Although, as former Polish citizens,
    we had the right to leave Vilnius.
    So we had to escape.
    So the escape from Vilnius was so dramatic
    that I remained with the idea that this is a place where
    I will never, ever return.
    I don't want it.
    I don't want my memories to be steered, and so on.
    Let it be there.
    But then one day, here in this very house, a short time
    after I move to the United States,
    I had a visit of a Lithuanian.
    His name is Rimantas Stankevicius.
    He was an advisor of the legal office of the Lithuanian
    Senate.
    And he was working on a book about Lithuanians
    who saved the Jews.
    And he found this story about Sister Marija Mikulska
    and Father Stakauskas, and Žemaitas who the three of them,
    they're very instrumental in our survival in the last three
    months before the Russians arrived,
    before the Germans left Vilnius.
    And of course, when he telephoned to me
    and he said he wanted to speak with me about it and so
    on, what I remember of being hidden in this specific place,
    I could not say no.
    I said, you know, I owe to these people in my life.
    So I will do whatever you ask me.
    So he came here and we spoke of it.
    And we kind of bonded in a friendship.
    Today, we are really very, very dear friends.
    And then Rimantas at a certain point
    said, well, how would it be to come and visit Vilnius?
    Oh, I say never, never.
    Unless there is some incredible reason or whatever.
    Well, a few days later, I had a call from Emanuelis Zingeris
    from Vilnius.
    Oh, I know him.
    And say, well, we're going to have
    an exhibition of your work.
    He would.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So that in September--
    I think on the 22nd, 24th of September
    was the opening of my show in the National
    Gallery of Art in Vilnius.
    So this 11 days--
    A big retrospective.
    And this was just a few days.
    So actually, with my wife, we were
    on the very first plane that left the airport here
    after 9/11.
    Oh, wow.
    It must have been on the, I don't know, 14th
    or 15th of September that we left from Vilnius
    because we had first class.
    So we were among the very first ones who left.
    So I arrived to Vilnius, and I was there already
    before because I told Rimantas if one day I
    will arrive to Vilnius, I don't want to arrive
    as an official person.
    I want to arrive very, very privately.
    So we will go in the May--
    this was before 9/11--
    with my wife.
    It's a very private business.
    I just want to see how I feel and so on.
    Because I had a memory I had a very vivid memory.
    Maybe because my profession is visual,
    so I have a very vivid memory.
    I remember the churches, you know.
    The churches were not very badly bombed.
    Somehow they kept the churches.
    And we arrived to Vilnius with my wife.
    And they opened the door of the plane.
    And down the coming the stairs, I
    saw Emanuelis Zingeris with Rimantas
    with more people with flowers, with journalists, with cameras.
    So much for private.
    The Prodigal Son is returning.
    OK.
    But then later on, I made some walks
    and I realized that everything was the way I remember it.
    It was very strange, because we are somehow
    also conditioned by the readings that we did and so on.
    And I remember from reading a book or a novel
    by Thomas Mann called Tonio Kroger where he returns
    after so many years and he remembers these big lions
    on the municipality.
    And these big lions are such small lions.
    They look like dogs.
    So I thought everything will look to me smaller.
    No.
    Everything looked to me the same.
    The same I remember.
    It was very, very, very strange.
    The color of the city changed, because when
    they have restored the old city and so on,
    they made it kind of very Mediterranean pink and orange
    and blue.
    Well, in my memory, it was all gray.
    This is one thing.
    And the thing that changed enormously
    is that in the streets, the language spoken between people
    was not a language that I remembered.
    It's not Polish.
    No, there was no Polish.
    There was only Lithuanian--
    Lithuanian, and some Russian.
    But no Polish.
    And certainly no Yiddish, so these things have changed.
    But all the rest actually remained very much
    the way I remembered it.
    Had you had apprehensions for political reasons to go back?
    Or was this--
    Political?
    No, I thought if they wanted me, if they wanted
    to have an exhibition of mine and so on, then I
    thought it's good because I will be able to speak
    of so many things.
    And they had an interview with me
    on the Lithuanian television, and I took them to the place
    where we were hidden.
    This was a wonderful occasion to speak
    of the people who were so instrumental in saving me.
    Also, I felt that these people had
    to be acknowledged as extremely important to show that--
    I mean, most people are, of course,
    dealing with facts the way which is very comfortable
    or the most comfortable.
    But some people have the courage to choose not
    a very comfortable, and even a dangerous way
    because they believe in something.
    So it was important to speak about these people.
    And then I was in the palace of the President Adamkus.
    And I receive from him, for instance,
    the medal that was given to the nun, Marija Mikulska,
    for what she did is as a righteous Christian.
    And since she had no inheritors or whatever,
    I was asked to receive that medal.
    So I mean, my going to Vilnius became
    more and more meaningful in what I can contribute.
    So that was good.
    OK.
    Now, let's go back.
    Back in time.
    Back in time.
    But you know, then I'll even go further back.
    But at this point, you talked about your escape
    with your mother and her difficulty
    in doing so because she had become important to her boss.
    And that that escape was so jarring that that's
    what said, never again.
    Tell me about the escape.
    What happened that made this so incredibly--
    What happened is that--
    well, we were already for almost a year under the Soviet's rule.
    So this would have been '45, '46.
    It was between '44 and '45.
    This must have been in the summer.
    It must have been--
    the war ended in May.
    And so this must have been in, I suppose, July or maybe August
    of '45.
    And my mother had no rights to leave, as I said before.
    And she arranged somehow to get papers from the hospital
    that she was hospitalized because of urgent surgery,
    and so on.
    And we left with just what we could carry.
    And we left for the trains.
    There were trains leaving, several trains a day
    with Polish citizens of Vilnius.
    It was a huge evacuation of population
    that the Russians wanted to get rid of.
    And also their Lithuanian communist authorities
    wanted to get rid of all of these
    to bring another population into the town.
    And it took us about, I think, 10 days or maybe two weeks
    to get to the border between Russia and Poland.
    Because sometimes the train would go slower
    than walking speed.
    Because lines were-- some lines were bombed,
    other lines were taken up by the military, and so on.
    And my mother was becoming more and more and more
    and more nervous.
    But everything was working very slowly.
    So at a certain point, we had police--
    Russian police.
    And they looked through our papers and so on.
    And there were several trains waiting.
    And we moved, and we passed.
    And we passed and we stopped, but we were already in Poland.
    And then, we were able to breathe.
    And then, the next train people arrived who my mother knew.
    And they told me, you know the police was looking for you?
    So we really passed about two hours or so
    before the police was looking for my mother.
    So we really kind of-- the 5 minutes to 12.
    It was something like that.
    So this certainly left in me--
    besides the fact that the whole idea of the Russian regime,
    when my mother finally, in the--
    I think it must have been already
    in the post-Stalin times.
    And my father's brother, my uncle David,
    came out alive from the gulag and he was in Moscow.
    And my mother, through all kinds of means,
    got in touch with him.
    He sent us a note to do him a favor and not to ask for him
    and not to show any sign of life, connection to him
    and so on, because he was scared.
    He was simply scared.
    So I mean, knowing in what condition these people lived,
    for me, this whole block--
    the block that kind of crystallized
    in the times of the Cold War, was something
    that I did not want to have anything to do with.
    Yeah.
    Well, it certainly sounds like a very nerve
    wracking 10 or 12 days that you were on that train.
    It's enough to--
    Absolutely.
    It was frightening.
    And I think that the actual journey is two hours, three
    hours normally.
    Oh, yeah, yeah.
    But this is, you know--
    Yeah, this was wartime, post-war.
    My mother had an aunt, Aunt Janina,
    who was extremely important for our survival.
    Aunt Janina was my grandfather's sister.
    When she was about the age of 14 or 15 converted.
    The one who made useless inventions?
    Sorry?
    The grandfather who made a useless inventions.
    Yeah, my grandfather who made useless inventions.
    His sister-- they were very close as children--
    very, very close.
    But she was in Vilnius.
    She was close, also, to his age somehow.
    She was put by her father--
    my great-grandfather-- to work in a shop.
    In a bakery that was providing the court of the Tyszkiewiczs
    Which was a very--
    Noble family.
    Noble family.
    They had a big palace, which later on
    became the gallery of art where I had my exhibition.
    She was working, I think since age 12 or 13,
    for these family of a Baker, who was providing them with cakes.
    And she was bringing the things.
    And she was very good looking, very lovely girl.
    And the governess of that palace took a liking to her.
    The governess and her husband were
    kind of far relatives of the Tyszkiewiczs.
    And they liked the girl very much.
    And the girl had a very hard time
    with the Jewish baker for whom she worked.
    Janina?
    Janina.
    A very hard time.
    First of all, because the wife of the baker
    was always pregnant and there were more and more children.
    Besides the fact-- this I don't know exactly because they never
    spoke to me as a child, but I kind of
    understood it later on when they spoke about her.
    The baker had a kind of a "Weinstein-like"
    interest in my mother's aunt.
    In Janina, herself?
    In Janina, yes.
    And she decided to escape from that place.
    And she fell into the arms of this couple, who
    then adopted her.
    You could, in the Russia of the tsar,
    adopt a Jewish child if you were able to prove
    that the child was baptized.
    And you did not need the rights of the parent--
    the agreement of the parents, or whatever.
    There was his very famous case in Italy, of course,
    with a Jewish child that created a big, big scandal.
    The Vatican was connected.
    This was in the 19th century?
    I don't remember now the name.
    The name, it was--
    there is a whole book about that.
    But anyway, this is the case, was the case of my great aunt.
    My mother's aunt, Janina.
    And she was then sent to complete studies in college
    for girls of good Polish families.
    I'm going to interrupt here just for a second,
    just so that on tape we understand
    what you're referring to.
    When you say that the baker had a "Weinstein-like"
    interest in her, you're referring to the scandal with
    Harvey Weinstein in California.
    Yes, of course.
    In the future 10, 20 years from now, people may not know.
    Yeah, maybe no one will know what Weinstein is.
    Although, today it is a kind of--
    Of course, it's known.
    It's known.
    Right, right.
    No, he simply had a--
    He was lecherous.
    Yeah.
    He was lecherous.
    OK.
    So she is sent to a college.
    She was sent to this college.
    Which happened to be in the Benedictine nuns convent, which
    was just opposite the house where so many years later I
    would live.
    And she developed there a very warm and loving relationship
    with the nuns.
    They married her off when she was
    quite young to a man who must have
    been at least twice her age, who was an engineer.
    He was a nephew of the archbishop of Warsaw.
    So he's a Pole?
    A Pole, Rushkevich.
    And he was an engineer.
    One of the heads of the exploitation of oil in Baku.
    Oh, wow.
    So she had two children--
    I think two sons with him in Baku.
    Then the revolution started, and so on.
    They escaped from there.
    He had very dear Russian friends who
    somehow managed to save them.
    And they arrived to Kaunas.
    And in Kaunas, she lost her two children.
    They died of, I think, the Spanish flu.
    So this was 1918, 1919?
    Yeah.
    But then she had two more sons, with whom I had,
    of course, contact.
    And when Vilnius became reattached to Lithuania
    and became the capital of Lithuania, this was in '40,
    Aunt Janina bought a house in Vilnius
    and moved to be close to her brother, my grandfather,
    and the family.
    And I remember Aunt Janina.
    I started to speak about Aunt Janina,
    how complicated the connections were between towns.
    Kaunas was 100 kilometers away from Vilnius.
    But when, in '36 or '37, Aunt Janina
    wanted to see her brother, my grandfather,
    she had to travel from Kaunas to Paris.
    Get, in Paris, papers to be able to visit Poland.
    And from Paris, went to Warsaw.
    And then forced us to Vilna to visit my grandfather.
    And then, she was still able to visit
    her father, my great-grandfather, who
    died just a few days before I was born, whose name I carry.
    Oh my goodness.
    And the towns are about an hour, hour and a half apart.
    Yeah, yeah.
    And it took about a week.
    So I mean, this was the realities with which
    people dealt in those years.
    But what is beautiful in this story
    is that when she was adopted by the Christian couple
    and disappeared from my grandfather's
    life and my great-grandfather's life,
    my great-grandfather was really quite an extraordinary man.
    I hope that I have some of his genes
    because he died somehow in his 90s.
    And in those years, in his 90s--
    That's a lot.
    That's a lot.
    But when he was 13, which was in the middle of the 19th century.
    When he was 13 and they celebrated his bar mitzvah,
    in order for him not to go and serve in the Russian army,
    he was married off.
    Usually, you could not, in the Jewish religion,
    marry of a boy before he had a bar mitzvah.
    But you could marry him at his bar mitzvah, at age 13.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And very often, they married off the boys of 13
    with much younger girls.
    Each child would be taken by the papers, where the rabbi would
    prepare the papers.
    And the army would not bother them.
    But it so happened that my great-grandfather was married
    off to a girl who was 15.
    And when they said, now everyone goes home,
    he says to his parents, I'm going with my wife.
    And he went to the rabbi and say, doesn't it say the Bible--
    and the rabbi said, the boy is right.
    So make the very long story shorter--
    I'm not making it short--
    at the age of 14, he was a father.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And then, there was a child about every year.
    Of course, not many children lived.
    I met the last of his daughters that he had at the age of 74.
    He was widowed three times.
    Every time, he had more and more and more children.
    He had something like about close to 25 living children.
    Produced between age of 14 to age of 70.
    Oh, my goodness.
    So Janina was one of the children
    that he lost to adoption.
    So he sat shiva.
    It means he--
    Mourned her.
    Mourned her.
    For him, she was dead and so on.
    And then when he was already, I think, close to 90 or so
    when she came to see him.
    He embraced her and says, forget all that.
    You're my child.
    I love you.
    How important.
    This was very important.
    So this was a very important closure for her.
    And then, she came and she became very, very close
    to my mother.
    And she found the place for my parents and me
    to hide in the convent where she was educated.
    Now, was this within the ghetto walls?
    Or was this outside?
    No, no.
    The convent was outside, but very close to the ghetto,
    very close to the ghetto.
    And this was-- the hiding took place before the ghetto was
    liquidated?
    No, the hiding took place--
    I mean, before the ghetto was created,
    my father was sent to cut some turf in the labor camp
    outside of the town.
    And I remained in the house with my mother.
    And then, we were one day sent to the ghetto.
    And there were about seven streets of the Vilna ghetto.
    And there were about 40,000 people
    pushed into these streets.
    But not-- the ghetto was not yet hermetically closed.
    It was very much in the middle of the city.
    And so that about one day after we were there with my mother,
    we managed to find a way out.
    My mother entered one shop, she found a way
    to a kind of a basement.
    And from there, another door, until we were out.
    And we went to her Aunt.
    To Janina.
    To Janina.
    And Janina then contacted the convent.
    And the convent had what was called the clausura, which
    means an inner part where most of the nuns
    lived that would never see anyone
    outside-- of the outside world.
    And no one was allowed to enter that part.
    But then, the head of the convent
    had special permission from the bishop of Vilna.
    And we were admitted there.
    My mother, my father, her sister, Yetta
    and my Uncle Yasha.
    So we were five of us in a room in this clausura
    for about six months.
    And after six months, the German authorities
    took over the convent in order to make it
    the headquarters of the Adolph Rosenberg
    collection of documents, papers, books, and so on.
    So from all Russia, books came there.
    We had no idea, strangely, that from that place
    the books would go to Berlin, where my mother's uncle was.
    I mean, you cannot invent such stories in literature.
    No, you can't make this up.
    You can't, no.
    No, it's incredible.
    And I found it out much later in life
    that he was there because a professor of the University
    of Freiburg has written a paper about Arno Nadel's fight
    for Spinoza.
    Now, Arno Nadel, who was--
    he finished the conservatory of music,
    he had academy for painting, and so
    on, the university, doctor of philosophy,
    and he was also a rabbi.
    No kidding?
    Yeah, all these things.
    He was a kind of a universal, universal--
    A Renaissance man.
    And this is why he was chosen to do this job.
    But I found out about him because he
    was fighting to annul the excommunication
    from the Jewish community of Spinoza
    because he was very influenced by Buddhist religion
    and by Buddhists.
    As a Jew from Vilna--
    you see, because there is something very special
    about Vilna's Jewishness, which is a very rational, very
    ethical Jewishness, contrarily to the Hasidic Judaism.
    I mean, the Jews of Vilna, the famous Gaon,
    the genius of Vilna that he was fighting, the mystical Judaism.
    Isn't that usually what the definition
    of a Litvak though would be?
    Yeah, yeah.
    Rational, very ethical.
    Yeah.
    So for him, Spinoza was just the most Jewish thing that--
    And how could he be excommunicated?
    The most Jewish vision of the world.
    And which is also very understandable
    because Spinoza was very much influenced
    by this Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, who saw everything
    as an abstraction.
    So from that professor, from the footnotes of his paper
    that he sent me some 30 years ago, which I have lost.
    This time, I don't even remember the name of the professor.
    But I learned that he was in the headquarters of Rosenberg.
    And he wrote in his diary.
    And I think that these diaries are today--
    In Berlin?
    In the Baeck Institute in New York.
    Oh, the Leo Baeck Institute.
    Yeah, the Leo Baeck Institute.
    Or maybe they are in Berlin.
    And so I don't know.
    Arno Nadel.
    But they have survived.
    And he wrote about how moving it was
    for him to hold all these manuscripts that were arriving
    from Vienna, which he didn't know
    is because in the very same place where we were hiding
    before the Germans created it as the headquarters of the Alfred
    Rosenberg Organization.
    In the last three months of the German occupation,
    I was with my mother hiding in the same place among the books
    that were there.
    So first you were in the clausura.
    In the convent.
    Of the convent.
    Then the Germans, the Rosenberg occupied--
    We escaped into the ghetto.
    And then you escaped into the ghetto?
    And then from the ghetto--
    yeah, we escaped into the ghetto.
    And I was in the ghetto.
    And this is where I had my show when I
    was nine years old, and so on.
    And then when the ghetto was liquidated,
    we were sent to a labor camp, which is outside of Vilnius,
    which is called [NON-ENGLISH] or HKP.
    HKP.
    Was that a fur kind of--
    No, the fur kind of place was Kailis.
    Kailis.
    Kailis was smaller.
    HKP was bigger.
    HKP-- you might have heard about Major Plagge.
    Yes, I did.
    The search Major Plagge.
    Well, Major Plagge created the HKP.
    Ah, Karl Plagge.
    He was one of those--
    Karl Plagge, yeah.
    It was called HKP, means Heeres Kraftfahr Park,
    something like that.
    Which means a place for cars of the army.
    So it was like a car repair shop or something?
    Yeah, so this was this was how my father who was working there
    as a welder managed to be among the people chosen by Plagge
    to be in the labor camp.
    And I was there when the ghetto was liquidated.
    And then when they liquidated the population of the children,
    I was among about 25 children that
    survived that liquidation of the children in the camp.
    We managed to escape.
    I mean, I have described all this much more in detail
    than I could tell now in my book.
    But when we escaped--
    Let me just put this in a little bit of context.
    So the ghetto, as far as I know, existed from let's say summer
    1941 to September 1943.
    Right.
    And for the first six months that the ghetto exists,
    you're actually not there.
    We were not there.
    And this was our luck because the ghetto
    had to undergo all these, what they called actions,
    to diminish the population.
    So from about a population of over 40,000,
    they brought it down to a population of 19,000.
    And then, it's about at that time that--
    That we reentered, yeah.
    That you re-enter because the Alfred Rosenberg Organization
    is taking over the convent and is using that
    as a sort of like a transit depot for all
    of the manuscripts.
    But the Spinoza that you refer to
    is not coming to Berlin via Vilna.
    It is probably from Amsterdam.
    This has nothing to do.
    The fight for Spinoza of Arno Nadal
    was in the '30s, was in the '30s.
    But in the '80s or so--
    1980s.
    1980, I received all these the text
    of the name of this professor in Freiburg
    who somehow found out about me, that my mother was a niece of--
    Arno Nadel.
    Of Arno Nadel.
    He sent me the thing where I learned about Spinoza.
    And in that, in the footnotes I learned
    that there were some quotations from Arno Nadel's diaries
    a short time before he was sent to Auschwitz.
    OK, OK.
    So you're in the ghetto until it's
    liquidated in September 1943.
    And you're liberated in July '44.
    Which means that it's almost a year's time that you are first
    in that HKP camp.
    And Karl Plagge, for those who don't know,
    would have been one of those righteous Germans who
    tried to save some Jews.
    Yes.
    And I believe he was eventually caught?
    I'm not sure.
    No, no.
    No, he survived?
    No.
    Karl Plagge survived.
    Karl Plagge died I think, somehow, in the '50s.
    OK, then I'm mistaken there.
    He was in contact with some of the people who
    were in the camp.
    A very good friend of the mine, [?Mischa Feinberg?],,
    who was a doctor, who had an exchange of letters with him.
    Yeah.
    So and then, you're in this camp for probably half a year.
    And then the last three months, you were again hidden.
    So we have the chronology at least there.
    Yeah, this is the right chronology.
    And while you're still in the ghetto,
    is when your paths cross with the two Yiddish poets,
    Sutzkever and Kaczerginski.
    Yeah.
    And how did you get to know them?
    Or how did they know get to know of you?
    Well, the story was that when we were in the ghetto, when
    we found finally where to sleep and find that place and so on,
    the ghetto had a kind of a school system inside.
    I mean, children were put into rooms.
    They found some teachers.
    And my mother took me to one of those schools.
    And as I remember, they opened the door,
    and it was packed with kids.
    And all the kids--
    girls or boys-- had shaved heads.
    And it frightened me.
    I said, I don't want to be shaved.
    So my mother said, this is because of lice.
    And so I said, I'm not going to the school.
    So she says, OK.
    So I did not go to the school.
    Because anyway, I wanted to go to draw, to do my--
    so she found for me a teacher who
    was a very fine teacher of a Jewish school
    from before the war, who was working
    in one of the labor units.
    And would return to the ghetto in the evenings.
    So that every day--
    Rachelė was her name.
    Rachelė Serowski.
    Rachelė would dedicate to me about two hours,
    from 8:00 to 10:00 in the evening.
    Wow.
    She must have been tired.
    She was tired, but I think she loved teaching me.
    And I was a great reader.
    So she also gave me an idea of what to read.
    So I would go to this Russian library, which was a library--
    a big library-- that was in the ghetto.
    And I would say very often sit there on the floor and read.
    And they knew me there.
    So my education was mostly reading books.
    Which was a terrific education.
    Terrific, terrific.
    I mean, actually, in '44 when the Russians took over Vilnius
    and the schools opened now under Soviet control,
    I was sent to this--
    my first day of school.
    Ever.
    Ever.
    My first day of school.
    My second day of school, I was already 15.
    But my first day of school, I was six or seven, more or less.
    Oh, so you're talking, not the Russians
    take over in '44, but in 1940.
    1940, yeah.
    1940.
    Yeah, yeah.
    It was a nice school.
    It was in a nice building, very close to where our house was
    so that I could go out from a side door of the building
    and walk without crossing a street, you see.
    Just walk and get there.
    And the teacher came and told us a story
    of a little girl who travels with her grandfather
    in a train.
    And there are lots of people going and coming.
    But she knows she's with her grandfather, she's safe.
    And then suddenly, she realizes that her grandfather
    might have gotten off the train or something.
    And she's by herself.
    And she starts to cry.
    And people pick her up.
    And then police takes her to the waiting room.
    And she cries, and she feels lonely, and it is terrible.
    And I remember the whole class, children were crying.
    Because everyone was identifying with this girl.
    And then she looks, and she sees a portrait of Stalin.
    And she says, oh.
    She says, I know where I am.
    Oh, I say, this is my father.
    And so I came home.
    And my mother says, well, what did you do in school?
    And I told her this story.
    And she says, well, my child this
    was your first day and your last day in that school.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So a very good friend of my mother who was a pediatrician
    gave her a paper that I cannot go to school because I have
    chronic bronchitis, which was partly true.
    And it's dangerous for me.
    Your mother had chutzpah.
    She had chutzpah
    I didn't go to school.
    I didn't go to school.
    My goodness.
    I didn't go to school.
    So the next time I went to school, I was 15.
    I arrived to Israel.
    And you went to school.
    And I had to learn Hebrew.
    I had to learn English.
    But just to say that my education was books.
    And Rachelė.
    And Rachelė
    OK, so we were talking about how you got to know the poets.
    Oh, so Rachelė was a very good friend of Kaczerginski.
    Or Sutzkever, I don't know.
    But Rachelė one day took me with many of my drawings,
    and took me to where Kaczerginski and Sutzkever
    lived.
    There is a photograph of the two of them
    on the balcony of that little room.
    And she brought them my drawings and so on.
    Well, Sutzkever wrote about it.
    There's a whole chapter in his book on the ghetto about--
    he only mistook Samek.
    He thought that he will make Samek
    sound a little more Jewish.
    So he turned from Samek to Zalmen.
    I don't know why.
    So I'm Zalmen there because of Samek.
    OK, but anyway they were quite fascinated by my work.
    And they kind of declared me as a child prodigy.
    But you know, you mentioned in your autobiography--
    One second.
    Do you want to put your tissue away?
    Because when you speak with both your hands,
    it's really engaging.
    And I know you're kind of--
    Yeah, and I can hear it.
    The tissue?
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    You're holding a tissue in your left hand.
    You want to just put that away?
    Yeah, I'll put that away.
    I noticed and you're not using his other hand to speak.
    OK, it's OK.
    You're really engaging when you speak that way.
    I'm sorry to interrupt.
    Is OK.
    It's OK.
    This is fine.
    Yeah, but I was about to do the same thing
    because I was hearing it.
    No problem.
    No problem.
    OK.
    So they give you--
    I remember that you write that they give you
    something called the Pinkas.
    Oh, yes, yes, yes.
    Tell me what that is because I couldn't fully understand it.
    What is the Pinkas?
    Well, it's a very, very complicated story.
    There's a whole book that came out
    recently about the books, the theft of books,
    the Jewish thieves of books, and so on.
    Because the Rosenberg Organization was collecting--
    in two places in Vilnius--
    books that were supposed to be material for research
    of the years before the purification of Europe.
    So in other words--
    From the lower, lower races, and so on.
    So in one place, which was the headquarters of the Rosenberg
    organization, there were papers and documents and books
    coming from Russia, all in Polish or Russian or Latin.
    So this would have been in Vilna?
    And in the building of the YIVO Institute,
    they were bringing Jewish manuscripts, Jewish books,
    and so on.
    And there was a group of Jewish intellectuals mostly,
    who worked in the YIVO to categorize and arrange
    the books.
    And some of the more important books they stole from there
    and brought them to the ghetto.
    And one of the books, the Pinkas, which is today--
    which belongs today to the museum in Vilnius.
    The Pinkas was a yearbook, actually,
    of the Society of Philanthropy, a Jewish Society
    of Philanthropy in the 17th century, or 18th century,
    and so on.
    In Vilna?
    In Vilna, yeah.
    It was a book where they had all the results of their elections,
    members of the various control settings because they
    were collecting money.
    But the money had to be spent on marrying of orphans, on feeding
    the homeless, and all the philanthropy and so on.
    And this book had some lovely illustration in the beginning
    but then, lots and lots of names.
    Names-- some of them a little familiar to me, some of them
    unknown.
    But mainly, it had a lot of empty pages.
    So Sutzkever and Kaczerginski managed to smuggle out
    a book from the YIVO.
    Brought it to the ghetto and gave it to me.
    An eight-year-old.
    And said, make drawings on all these empty pages
    which are in this book so you will have
    meanwhile something to draw on.
    But keep good care of the book because this
    will be a document.
    I did not understand the idea of the document.
    I did not.
    But I understood it has pages where I can
    make my scribbles, my drawings.
    It's very interesting.
    I mean, it's also something that is really counter to what
    anybody who's a real archivist would do,
    is give you something that's over a century old
    and say, draw in it.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Well, but you know--
    I mean, they thought that maybe I will not survive.
    And maybe all these things will leave
    a document, which will be more interesting than what
    are the various committees of control or whatever.
    From the 18th century.
    Of the 18th century, yeah.
    So I had this book.
    And I was making drawings in that book.
    It was called the Pinkas.
    And I took the book with me to the labor camp.
    And when I escaped from the labor camp, of course,
    that book remained there.
    And then in '44, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski,
    were in the partisans.
    They came to Vilnius.
    And Kaczerginski started to collect all kinds of remains
    of the Jewish culture and so on in order to create a ghetto.
    This was before the authorities of Russia
    started to push aside all the data that was concerning
    that period and made the Holocaust into something
    that hardly ever existed.
    At that time, he found the Pinkas in the Subocz,
    in the premises of the camp.
    And he said, do you want to see your drawings?
    We found them.
    And I said, I don't want to see them.
    But he also said, there is a little--
    there are some stains on the cover.
    Maybe some blood.
    And so I said, I don't want to see it.
    So the book remained there with the artifacts
    of that period that were collected by Kaczerginski.
    Then many years later, it must have been in '64 or '65--
    I was in Israel.
    I had a show in Israel--
    I was visited by the director of all the museums in Lithuania
    who was in the state visit to Israel.
    This must have been, as I said, in '64 or '65.
    OK, it's pretty early.
    Pretty early for a visit.
    And he said, you know, I discover that you have a show.
    Now but I know that we have a book with many drawings of you
    as a child.
    All I wanted you to know is that if one day you
    want this book to be part of one of your exhibitions,
    just ask the Russian embassy for the book
    and we will do whatever we can to provide them that.
    I thanked him for it, and so on.
    But then later, there was the Six-Day War,
    the Russian embassy from Israel was liquidated, and so on.
    And then time passed, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
    And when I was interviewed here in the studio for a movie
    that a neighbor of my childhood, Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren,
    was doing about Vilnius.
    Mira, I remember, she was this kind of an older girl.
    I was I was six and she must have been eight.
    So she wouldn't look at me.
    And they lived just two houses away from where we lived.
    In the ghetto?
    So I remember her.
    No, in Vilnius before the ghetto.
    Oh, before the ghetto.
    OK.
    So I remember it, Mira Jedwabnik from--
    but anyway, I told her I know that you are going to Vilnius.
    Look up the Pinkas.
    There you will find some of my drawings.
    So she went to make part of her filming in Vilnius.
    Looked for the book--
    it disappeared.
    It disappeared.
    Didn't know, never heard about it, they didn't know.
    And then when I arrived to Vilnius,
    they have just found it.
    They have found because it was part of the Soviet museum
    that the Lithuanians have closed as soon as they
    opened their own institutions.
    But then, they opened it.
    And I was invited by the director
    of the National Gallery in Lithuania to see the Pinkas.
    So then I saw it.
    And on that occasion, she made the Pinkas
    a gift to the Jewish Museum.
    The Jewish Museum, which then, Emanuelis Zingeris
    was building.
    That's right.
    So this is how it ended up being today exhibited
    in a little plastic box in the back museum in Vilnius today.
    The Pinkas, with all these 18th century committees
    of Jews and my drawings.
    Now, when you looked at it the second time, can you tell us
    what were the drawings that were in there?
    What were the subjects that you drew?
    Well, yes.
    I mean, many of these drawings can
    be also seen on the internet because they are part
    of the Samuel Bak Archives.
    So some are very funny drawings.
    Some are illustrations of things I read.
    And at that time in the ghetto, I
    was fascinated with the Greek mythology.
    I was fascinated by Ulysses.
    I was fascinated-- so some of these things
    have to do with illustrations of what I could kind of figure out
    in my head, were the hero of the Greek mythology.
    All this escaping of a child.
    So it wasn't ghetto scenes, it was Greek mythology.
    Oh, no.
    It was not ghetto scenes.
    The ghetto scenes were there for free.
    And you don't want to look at that.
    It has no interest for me to make ghetto scenes.
    I wanted another world where I could escape.
    So for Kaczerginski and for Sutzkever,
    the idea that this would be a document that
    could survive and tell something,
    it was Greek mythology that was in there.
    Yeah, well it was a mythology.
    Projected mythology.
    But so logical.
    Because what would a child do?
    You have fantasy.
    Yeah.
    Well, yeah.
    You have fantasy.
    OK.
    I'd like to then talk about the details of your being--
    from the three months between when
    the labor camp is liquidated and the liberation happens
    by Soviet soldiers in '44.
    I'd like to talk about that.
    And then, I'd like to turn to your art today.
    OK.
    So how did we get out from the labor camp?
    That's another--
    Yes, tell me.
    It's quite a frightening story because one evening some people
    came to this little room that we shared with some other people.
    And said there are trucks with some German army waiting.
    Something is going to happen.
    And the next day, the German SS officers came into that area.
    I must say, the camp was a big area, closed by barbed wire,
    where there were two very big buildings.
    The two big buildings were built in the turn
    of the century for homeless and poor people
    by the Baron von Hirsch for the Jewish community.
    So this was the camp.
    Can you tell me, was this outside Vilna?
    Yeah, it was a little outside of Vilna.
    It must have been about 10 kilometers away from Vilnius
    in a place called Subocz.
    And so when somebody had to announce something
    to all the people that were in the two buildings--
    we must have been about 1,500 men, women, and children
    and so on.
    All the women were working.
    The men were working.
    And the children were there very much left to themselves.
    But this was the amazing thing that parents were still
    with their children that Major Plagge has achieved,
    which was an unheard of thing.
    Today, when you know about the Holocaust and so on,
    you say, he was extraordinary, this man.
    But, OK.
    I did not know at that time that this man whom I remember--
    of course, Major Plagge, walking always at a distance.
    You kept a distance from these people.
    But I remember him very well.
    I didn't know that he was such a hero.
    I didn't know anything.
    He was a German, which means he was bad.
    But he was a good bad man.
    They say he's a good man.
    So anyway, they came out.
    And with--
    Excuse me, they said at the time?
    With megaphones, they called.
    They said, all the children out for vaccinations.
    And then the parents understood that most probably if they
    want the children, it's not for vaccinations.
    Because people knew that the Russians are getting closer.
    People were wondering what will happen
    to the people of the camp.
    That most probably they will liquidate the camp, and so on.
    So when they say it's all children out,
    the parents understood.
    So at a certain point, my mother was--
    my mother was by herself with me in the room.
    And then they started to send out people from the rooms.
    So she took me and she went with all the rest of the people.
    The staircase was packed.
    And when we arrived with my mother in this crowd of women
    and children, almost to the exit door,
    there was on a lower corridor, there
    was a corridor where there were still
    some rooms of people of the camp,
    there was a friend of my mother, Slava.
    She was the wife of Dr. Feinberg,
    who was a doctor of the camp.
    And Dr. Feinberg, with whom Plagge had after the war,
    correspondence.
    Slava got my mother by her arm and pulled her with me
    inside that corridor that was empty,
    and pushed us into a room where there was her daughter, Mita.
    If I was then about 10 years of age, and Mita
    must have been 12 years.
    And there was another little boy there.
    We were pushed under the beds.
    But from the outside--
    because at first, it was a ground floor room,
    the window was blocked out.
    But we heard screaming and we had
    we heard the fire of a machine gun and so on.
    And a lot of yelling and crying.
    But on the other side of the door,
    we also heard some banging.
    And that's where my father and Slava's husband, Misha,
    came with all kinds of planks of wood, an old door, whatever.
    They kind of closed that.
    And what I learned later is that when
    my when my father and Misha stayed
    not far from the door and German soldiers
    started to search for who might be hidden where
    and started to move that thing, my father
    put into the hands of the soldier
    a gold coin, which was like a five gold ruble.
    And a soldier put it into his pocket
    and then moved away and left it.
    The soldier didn't know that this gold ruble was something
    that my father fabricated before of copper.
    But anyway, he left us.
    And the trucks left with the children.
    And the people were to bury several Jewish women who
    were killed when they refused to let hold of their children.
    And at that point, each one of us had a number.
    And from that camp, it happened before when somebody escaped,
    they took 10 numbers before and 10 numbers after that person
    and executed them.
    Which means that the people were controlling themselves
    in the camp in a way that they did not even
    need the army around.
    Because it was known that if in the appell, as it was called--
    That's right.
    The roll call.
    The roll call in the morning, some numbers will be missing.
    That's what will happen.
    I'm going to pause you one second while we change cards.
    OK.
    The last thing I want to do is put words or categories
    and typecast, as you say.
    But it's sort of--
    I may not have the language myself to ask the question,
    but I'll give it a try.
    We make fun of Soviet realism--
    Of socialist realism.
    Of socialist realism because it's flat,
    because it's political, because it's not art.
    But then what is?
    And yet at the same time, the events that were so shaking,
    that shook people, that destroyed them and so on
    were political events.
    And yet the way to look at them, you're
    struggling against being typecast and have this label.
    But how do you make it--
    It's very, I mean--
    Sorry.
    How does subject matter affect the form of art?
    I mean, we look at Soviet art and we say
    Soviet realism is really bad.
    We look at it almost forgivingly and so on.
    It is true that not too many good artists have done that.
    Not too many good artists have really
    had emotions or feelings that were part of their production.
    This was kind of an imposed art form.
    But if we look a little further away,
    the Catholic mythology has nourished fantastic artists.
    Tintoretto, Titian, Michelangelo.
    I mean, what would they have done without the subject
    matter?
    And yet their art is great.
    Is their art great because of the subject matter?
    Not at all.
    Certainly not.
    It is because of how it was done.
    So the how is very important.
    The what is something that is also important,
    but on a different level.
    On a very different level.
    And the when is also very important.
    Because when you paint like Michelangelo
    in the time of Michelangelo, it's OK.
    And when you paint like Michelangelo today, you say,
    is this kind of postmodern?
    What is it?
    So these are not subjects that we can really
    elucidate in a kind of a conversation
    that we are doing now.
    But what I can say is that I have
    a feeling like I guess so many [INAUDIBLE]
    have who do not have anymore the comfort of religion,
    who do not have anymore this kind of address
    where you can say so please let the other people
    die but keep me alive.
    And so I mean, we don't have that.
    So you have many questions.
    And you know you have to live with questions,
    and you will never have the answers to them.
    So the answers--
    I'm looking for some answers in my art.
    This is a result of a kind of a conversation
    that I have with myself.
    And this is why one of the films about my work
    was called Samuel Bak, The Painter of Questions.
    What are your questions?
    The question is-- the basic question
    is, what does it all mean?
    And we don't know what does it all mean.
    So here we go.
    I think that maybe we should make a little tour--
    Yes, let's do that.
    Of the paintings.
    So I will show you a few that will kind of reconnect
    with what I said before.
    The other thing that when you were talking about the how,
    the what, and the when is that what can become dogma.
    Oh, absolutely.
    Absolutely.
    And that's where, I guess, is part
    of what I was talking about socialist realism.
    There could have been something dynamic.
    That what is very important.
    The what can become a horrible movie like Life
    Is Beautiful, for instance, or can
    become a sentimental movie, like Schindler's List,
    or it can become--
    I mean, my painting The Family is
    on the cover of Facing History, teaching
    the history of the Holocaust based on Schindler's List.
    I have seen Schindler's List, and I
    knew some people who could not stand Schindler,
    who Schindler was using them.
    OK, but sometimes knowing too much is not good.
    Sometimes you don't-- you should just leave out some things
    and--
    Well, that brings in another factor at this point,
    at this time in our history is that our history is often
    written by Hollywood rather than history books.
    Or popular, let's say popular history.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Oh, absolutely.
    Popular history, that's what it is.
    And so these nuances that you would know that really
    matter because they're life, they're the reality,
    for the sake of story, they do not
    get included because they don't further the story.
    Absolutely.
    OK.
    So let's start our tour.
    Let's start our tour.
    Go right back.
    OK, do you want this open or closed?
    That can be open.
    And tell him where you want him to be.
    We're ready any time you want to.
    So why don't we talk about this?
    Why don't we talk about this particular poster?
    We spoke before about my exhibition in Nuremberg.
    I must say, this was the poster of the exhibition
    at the Nuremberg National Museum.
    It so happens that I refused to go to Germany.
    I went to Germany in '64.
    I went to Berlin to do scenery for a play.
    It was the last production of Erwin Piscator, who
    was quite a famous theater man.
    But somehow I was very troubled with the exhibition of my works
    in Germany as if I was kind of a part of a whitewashing machine
    and so on.
    So I had an exhibition in Heidelberg.
    I kind of find excuses not to go.
    But when I had an exhibition in Nuremberg,
    I said OK, I will go, because it was very important.
    It was opened by the minister of culture.
    It was the German National Museum.
    It was [GERMAN] that organized the whole thing.
    So this was in '78.
    And they asked me for an image.
    I thought, well, my connection to [INAUDIBLE],, Nuremberg,
    and so on.
    So I used the face of his portrait of his old mother
    that he did some time before she died.
    And the angel of the melancholia I connected.
    I have another version of it there.
    Some versions are in the [INAUDIBLE] house.
    And besides, that which is from '78, I have used it--
    this is a poster of my work really
    clearly connecting that angel that
    is between different periods with the image of the Warsaw
    ghetto boy here.
    And the angel is up there again.
    Or that again.
    Here again.
    The same angel.
    This is this painting, I think, is called
    the Angel of the Travelers.
    You have some refugees.
    You have some refugees here that are waiting.
    They are waiting.
    They don't know where they are going to go,
    how they are going to go.
    They are meanwhile falling apart.
    This one here, for instance, is made out of bits and pieces
    and so on.
    And this was the exhibition, the poster of the exhibition,
    my first exhibition in Vilna.
    And they called it Returning Home.
    And this is in 2001.
    And this was in 2001.
    Right, in 2001.
    And in 2014, I visited Vilna with my grandson,
    who was then 13.
    And I took him to the place where
    there is a photograph of myself with my grandfather.
    [LAUGHS]
    And the decades apart.
    Yes, yes, then I took every grandson to Vilna
    when they arrived to the age at which I can tell the story.
    I still have one left who is he is now 11.
    So in about a couple of years, I hope I will still
    be in good shape to take him.
    And the other poster that you have here?
    Oh, this is an exhibition that the [INAUDIBLE] Museum
    did of my work.
    But this was done much later.
    This was done I think in 2011, '12.
    Yes.
    And this is a kind of a biblical figure that is dreaming.
    It's a poster of the show that I had there.
    A much earlier work that I have--
    [INAUDIBLE] I have a question about both-- all of-- you
    chose this for the Nuremberg.
    No, I did not choose.
    All the choices for the posters were done
    by the people of the museums.
    OK, that was my question.
    OK.
    So now we can, I think, walk to see some of the others.
    We can walk over there.
    No, we can't.
    If they come a little later and they
    have to stay a little longer, it will be very important
    that they can film there some of my paintings.
    Will Bernie be there at 4 o'clock?
    He will, but we have an event tonight that starts at 6:00.
    You have an event at 6:00.
    I see.
    So no, that's OK.
    That's absolutely no problem.
    No problem.
    So I understand that anyway you will be there.
    So that's OK.
    That's fine.
    So if they get here at 4:00, are they still with you?
    Or have they left?
    No, no, no.
    They are still with me.
    [INAUDIBLE] come at 4:00, they would
    need to probably be done by between 5:00 and 5:30.
    OK, OK.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    I understand.
    OK.
    Good, I will explain to them, and I
    will try to call later when we have finished here.
    I will try to call.
    OK, bye.
    He has not returned.
    They have an event at 6:00.
    So you can have there until 5:30.
    I think that's going to be more than enough time.
    That'll be fine.
    And it's very kind of to accommodate us.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We are recording.
    And any time you're ready.
    OK, so the very first one.
    Let me just check that I have disconnected it.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Let's talk about the young boy in this portrait.
    Well, this is a self portrait that I did age 13.
    It was really before--
    my mother was speaking of a bar mitzvah.
    I don't know.
    It's kind of an important event.
    And you have to learn something with a rabbi
    and you have to go to the synagogue.
    And at that time, I mean, I very much believed
    when I was 10 years or nine years of age in Jesus,
    because the nuns have taught me the catechism and prayers
    and so on.
    And then later on, little by little, my sense about God
    and the Almighty and so on started somehow to evaporate.
    And by the time I was 13 and I painted this portrait,
    I told my mother, [INAUDIBLE] bar mitzvah.
    I won't have any bar mitzvah.
    But if God wants me to have a bar mitzvah, first of all,
    he comes here.
    And on his knees, he says, forgive me
    what I have allowed to happen to your father
    and your grandparents.
    I was still believing.
    I mean, today it seems to be very funny that the age of 13 I
    was speaking like that.
    But my stepfather--
    But in some ways it's profound.
    My stepfather was a very nice man.
    And he told my mother, he said, a boy of 13 is still a child.
    A bar mitzvah is like having the right to cast a vote.
    He has to be 18.
    A bar mitzvah in Jewish religion you
    can have at any age after 13.
    Oh really?
    Yeah, you can have it at the age of 90.
    One day when I'm 120, I can still ask for a bar mitzvah.
    But that's OK.
    So anyway, I never had a bar mitzvah.
    And this is also why my grandsons, well, their fathers
    are not religious and so on.
    But I take them at the age of 13 to Vilnius, spend with them
    a few days, tell them about the family,
    tell them about all that went on so we have
    memory is an important thing.
    Memory is an important thing.
    So this, of course, is something related to a mother and a child
    and being discovered and the rifle and the burlap sack.
    The whole shebang is here.
    There it is.
    There it is.
    And this is a painting that I was painting when [INAUDIBLE]
    was visiting Landsberg.
    And they had a team of filmmakers.
    And I did not--
    I had a still of that film.
    I had no idea there was footage.
    And when I went for the first time
    when they opened the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
    I went with my wife to the Holocaust Museum.
    And at a certain point, we were going out
    and I heard Landsberg on one of the monitors.
    And suddenly, I see myself painting this painting.
    [INAUDIBLE] It's very short.
    It's a very short moment.
    But it's not something you expected.
    No, I did not expect at all.
    And I started to smile.
    And [INAUDIBLE] I'm going out, because people
    will see me so happy because I had
    the proof that I have survived.
    I mean, I had tangible proof.
    It's not-- OK, and then years later when my memoir, my book
    came out in Germany, I had here a German journalist
    that did service for me for the program of art which
    is called Metropolis.
    And she said, now who is this woman in the footage
    that we have on the internet?
    I said, what woman?
    She said, it is you painting a painting.
    But before that, there is a woman sitting.
    She says, is it your mother?
    I said, my mother?
    So she brought me to my computer,
    went to the footage which is of Landsberg,
    and was able to show me my mother sitting reading a book
    and then coming over to me and putting
    her hand on my shoulder.
    And I'm painting think this painting.
    How sadly years after my mother was dead,
    suddenly I discover her.
    A good looking woman.
    That I don't know.
    She was born in '12 and this was in '45.
    Not old at all but having gone through hell, so yeah.
    And so this is art.
    This is actually a memory of the port of Rotterdam.
    And this is something that I went
    through a period of almost gestural painting
    but always with a kind of a connection to reality.
    This was done in '61, this painting.
    And in '61, I had quite a lot of success with these paintings.
    I was selected for the Carnegie in Pittsburgh from Rome.
    This one I lived in Rome.
    But my first exhibition in Rome was in '59.
    And one of the paintings, the darkest paintings
    of all that I've chosen to keep for myself of the show
    is this one.
    Is this one here, which is a kind of an abstraction.
    But it has something of almost a nuclear disaster of things
    where there are kind of black tears
    coming from the sky, where there is something burning there,
    which is an incineration.
    It's a total end of things.
    So this is examples of an art that I was doing in
    the late '50s, early '60s.
    And was that conscious?
    When you describe this to us, [INAUDIBLE]..
    Yes, yes, I felt somehow.
    I think I always tried to let in my art things happen.
    And then I, first of all, kind of my subconscious
    guide my hand and then try to understand what
    is it that I am telling myself.
    Until this very day, this is how I work.
    I'll take you to the floor below.
    Good.
    And recording.
    OK, tell us about this.
    Yeah, well this, strangely enough,
    is related to a very specific memory.
    I was shaken by the assassination of Kennedy,
    but mainly of Bobby Kennedy.
    And I painted for myself a monument
    to Bobby Kennedy, a hard boiled egg.
    [LAUGHS]
    I don't know why.
    I imagine he was a hard boiled egg.
    So I never sold this painting.
    Somebody very much wanted to have this painting.
    I said, OK, one day I'll paint for you another version
    of that painting.
    But this I always kept for myself.
    A hard boiled egg with some bullet holes.
    Yeah.
    Exactly.
    But that was the story.
    And so here is one of the--
    I painted many still lifes, which are, if you want,
    still lifes created by something that
    resembles objects which are not real, which
    are kind of our limited possibility to recreate,
    to tell how it was and so on.
    It's always it comes close to something.
    A pear is not really a pear.
    It resembles a pear.
    A bottle is not really a bottle where
    you can put in some liquid.
    There is over it here hovering a kind
    of symbol of peace, a dove.
    But is peace really a sure thing?
    Can the wing really allow the peace to--
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    So these still lifes are--
    the pear.
    The pear for me was somehow--
    I don't know.
    I think when I was really a child,
    for me the idea of the pear was the fruit of paradise,
    was the fruit of knowledge.
    Everything was in the pear.
    I don't know.
    Maybe because it has a kind of a more
    feminine form than the Apple.
    I mean, nobody knows what the fruit of the paradise was.
    The painters picked up the apple,
    but it could have been also something else.
    Could you walk over towards the painting?
    It's a little easier to shoot.
    Yeah, there where you can talk about it.
    So the pear is here.
    And of course, what is also here is the smokestack
    that is part of our history.
    But it's something, I mean, the history of the 20th century
    is suggested.
    Sometimes it's much more evident.
    Like for instance, in this painting,
    I painted the boy, the boy of war.
    So you know the boy, where he is with his arms up.
    And there are many, many boys, many, many boys with their arms
    up.
    So this painting, my wife chose this one among, I don't know,
    about 20 or 30 that I did.
    And I gave this painting, I gave it the title For [? Jose. ?]
    So it will be for her.
    And this one here is one of the chess paintings.
    It's an old chess painting where, again, there
    is the [? pawn, ?] the little [? pawn, ?]
    over there in a landscape.
    But the [? pawn ?] is represented sometimes
    as a passage, sometimes as a little monument
    there, sometimes in a wall and so on.
    Sometimes even as an opening to a door that doesn't exist.
    How did you make the decision between what
    paintings you keep at home and what
    paintings are out there for--
    Well, let's say I have produced quite a lot of art.
    A lot of it served me.
    There were years that I could sell everything
    that I was doing.
    But nevertheless, I kept things aside.
    When I had my exhibitions going to various museum in Germany,
    I had to buy back a few things, because people would not simply
    give them on loan for long times.
    And then I always had also the feelings
    that my works belong to me and will all belong to me.
    I mean, I was given life and given
    a comfortable life and the ability
    to do what I really love to do for so many years.
    And I still do it.
    So I feel that my things should also belong to the public.
    So this is why I gave-- and you know in the United States,
    there is no writing off when an artist gives a gift is art,
    not even once cent.
    Not even once cent can he write off.
    Not even the price of the brushes or paint or canvas.
    Simply because there is no such a thing as a lobby of artists
    in Washington.
    So you don't try.
    So this is a really true gift.
    I gave to the museum in Vilnius 125 works.
    I gave to the Holocaust Museum in Houston 125 works.
    They will have a permanent gallery of my paintings.
    And they will be able to show them
    every time about 40, 50 works.
    And the idea that these works will
    be seen by thousands of young people
    accompanied and so on, this story will be told and so on.
    Not my story, but the story of what has brought.
    I mean, this is so important to me.
    It's a real privilege.
    And I still have a lot of work that I hope
    to find for the places that--
    Homes.
    The right homes.
    More than homes.
    Because homes, I mean, I live from what people
    give as homes for my paintings.
    But with modern homes, really kind of public institutions
    where the paintings can reach the ones
    that can learn from them something.
    So that's the story.
    Any others that we should see down here that you'd like?
    No, I think that--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We can.
    I mean, if you want.
    What I would like to do--
    We're running out of time to get there
    by 4:00, just to let you know.
    We can get a few more minutes, but I
    wouldn't spend a lot of time.
    What I would like to do is that we
    chose a few that are going to be at the [INAUDIBLE]..
    Yeah, so this painting was painted in '73, '74.
    It was actually painted for an exhibition
    that I was supposed to have in London.
    But then there was this energy crisis and so on.
    It ended up in an exhibition that I had in New York.
    And this is when I sold it.
    But I thought this is an important painting,
    because first of all, it's quite large.
    And then I try to sum up all kinds of things.
    I try to put into it figures from my family.
    My great grandfather, not the one
    whose name I carry, but the other one who
    was a blind mechanic.
    Then my grandfather, who was an inventor.
    I gave him only half a head, but it resembles Leonardo da Vinci.
    My mother, who before the war was looking
    at the world with blind eyes.
    I mean, I try to put into this painting
    also what we remember of the ones that were lost,
    who we kind of recreate only partially, because we only
    know some parts of them.
    Some are completely covered.
    I mean, it's a kind of a painting
    that sums up a lot of things that were going on in my head.
    And many of these people, of course, I still
    knew and that I lost, and they were in the ghetto.
    So I also took the ghetto as a subject
    that I described in many different paintings.
    And one of them is the ghetto which
    is somehow set in a deep area.
    Sometimes it is--
    I mean, it returns.
    It repeats.
    And also the subject of the tablets of the [? law ?]
    that fall apart.
    But some of these paintings I must confess
    are based on an old Midrash, a legend.
    Because the rabbis throughout the ages
    were asking themselves, how is it
    that Moses, who received these enormous tablets of the law,
    was able to carry them?
    They must have been very heavy.
    So the explanation was the letters
    that were embedded in those stones kept them floating.
    They had no weight.
    But when Moses came to the space that suddenly he
    saw below him the people that were worshipping
    the golden calf, the letters tore themselves away
    from the stones, and the stones fell from his arms
    and they broke to pieces.
    Because Moses would have never shattered anything
    that God gave him.
    I love very much this story of what
    happens when somebody is so disappointed
    and suddenly all the things which are inscribed in him,
    all the beliefs and so on, fly away,
    and then there is this shattering moment.
    So I used it to describe this.
    Well, in some ways, it's also faith and trust
    in the world, in one's neighbors, in one's self.
    Absolutely.
    And when that's lost, how to regain.
    If to regain.
    This boat, for instance, is also a boat
    that is going to the Promised Land,
    carrying with it the stacks, carrying with it
    the tablets of the law, carrying with it
    memory of houses many of them completely lost.
    And all this anchored in a kind of a wall that
    has something to do with the western wall of Jerusalem.
    What else was that we will see at the gallery?
    You will see at the gallery quite a good number
    of my works.
    And what I have been telling you about my work
    is somehow it illustrates them.
    Not all of my works are specifically
    connected to stories.
    I very much consider my work as a kind
    of an endless process of opening a babushka and finding in it
    a smaller one.
    And when I take it out, it grows, and you open it,
    and there is another one.
    So every painting I do, I feel there
    is another painting in it.
    And I keep on just [INAUDIBLE] another one.
    And of course, it's not only a self centered thing.
    Because there is also art, and there is what
    I learned from other artists.
    Every day I spend some time in front
    of a large screen of computer.
    I go Google Art Project.
    I look at some paintings that were done centuries before me
    [INAUDIBLE] and so on.
    So I think that art is born from art.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very, very much.
    Pleasure.
    I will say that this concludes the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Mr. Samuel Bak on December 4,
    2018 in Western Massachusetts.
    Thank you.
    It's been fascinating.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you.
    We're good.
    Wonderful.
    I would just like to just get one cutaway.
    So if you just want to go ahead and just
    explain who's who in this painting.
    So for instance, in this man, I saw my great grandfather,
    who was the teacher of my other great grandfather, whom
    you have seen on the photograph with me.
    He was a soldier.
    He was an ambulance driver in the war against Japan.
    1905.
    In 1905.
    And my mother, who was completely
    blind to the events before the war after the war
    became such a Zionist.
    But before the war, all she thought
    was how to provide her little boy the best paradise
    she could create for him.
    And there are various people coming.
    There are various kind of partial recreations of people,
    because this is like memory.
    Memory never catches the whole thing,
    or else our knowledge is very often a partial knowledge.
    We only know some parts of things, some parts of stuff.
    And sometimes we are also blind to some things.
    So this painting is a kind of a collection
    of all these thoughts.
    Show us Leonardo da Vinci, because you explained him.
    Here.
    Yeah, my grandfather was an inventor.
    You will be able to read about him in my book.
    I mean, his invention of the mousetrap that plays
    music when the mouse falls in.
    [LAUGHS] And all kinds of things.
    I think you will enjoy my book.
    Let me see if I have a copy I will give you.