Artist Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland in August of 1933, seven years before the Nazi-German occupation. Bak was raised in the ghetto of Vilna before a forced move with his family to a labor camp. Shortly thereafter, he ended up as a refugee in a monastery after being snuck out. He had endured a lifetime’s worth of war in those few years and the atrocities of the occupation had a tremendous effect on him, like with most who had encountered the Holocaust. He was taken, along with all of his family, because he was Jewish and after the war, Bak and his mother were the only left in his family. This, along with everything else he had seen during his time in the ghetto and labor camps, plagued Bak for years. However, something positive, at least for the art community, came from this experience: the painting of several series in which Bak tackled what he had encountered. He portrayed those events and images metaphorically in a less-than-traditional, surrealist manner.......
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