SAMUEL BAK Icon of Loss - The Photo of the Warsaw Boy in my Art

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SAMUEL BAK
Icon of Loss - The Photo of the Warsaw Boy in my Art
The title of today’s panel is: Building a Better World – The Legacy of the
Survivors and Celebrating Israel in its 60th Year.
I have called my presentation Icon of Loss and it is about my art. In it I shall
speak of the famous photo of the Warsaw Ghetto Boy, an iconic image that
appears in many of my recent paintings.
Between the title of today’s panel and the subject of my current work there
seems to be a disconnect. In fact, when I began preparing this talk I
wondered: should an event that is celebrating Israel’s birth and legacy be
presented with the figure of a child that so blatantly evokes the liquidation of
the Warsaw Ghetto? Rather than drawing attention to that most poignant
symbol of loss, of mourning, and perpetual fear of annihilation, -- a child
that surrenders to death -- wouldn’t it be better to speak of rebirth, of
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resilience, of accomplishments? After all, I have had the privilege of a long
artistic career, Yad Vashem has honored me with a large retrospective . . .
But it so happens that this specific subject is very dear to my heart.
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Those familiar with my art know that I am an artist who mostly asks
questions and rarely offers answers. When I first considered the topic I have
chosen for today, I was filled with doubt. But within moments my thoughts
wandered off from this celebration to other Jewish celebrations, and I
thought of the glasses that people break at Jewish weddings, the unfinished
corners of walls in new houses -- symbolic reminders of the destruction of
the Temple -- and instantly my uncertainty was gone. My answer was: yes,
I’ll speak of the boy! What could be more Jewish than that!
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Indeed, let’s speak of this boy, and I shall leave alone the other children,
distraught mothers, German soldiers with pointed guns, and all additional
participants in the famous photo. I noticed how poignantly the figure of the
boy remained detached from the crowd. Dedicated to him and to them are
innumerable essays, research papers, and books --an ever-growing field of
exploration. But mine is a separate chapter. Today I shall try to direct our
attention to the Warsaw Boy in my paintings.
So first let us make a leap of sixty years and land in the newborn State of
Israel in the summer of 1948. The war of independence is still raging. A
rusted vessel named Pan York docks at the port of Haifa.
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It brings with it an over-spilling shipload of Holocaust survivors. Its deck is
packed with thousands of excited faces, gesticulating hands, and among
them am I, a boy of fifteen. We have just completed a seemingly
interminable voyage on this former Cuban banana carrier, which treated its
human cargo as if it were lifeless merchandise, hardly allowing us any space
to move, or air to breath. Generously providing collective seasickness, daily
dishwater soup, overcrowded toilets, and forever-crying babies. But people
rarely complained. We were the chosen ones. We had survived the Shoah.
We were the privileged participants of an unprecedented historical event.
The hardships of our grueling voyage were accepted with understanding,
even joy.
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Few observers realized that in the hold of the Pan York, together with me,
my mother, my stepfather, and thousands of other olim from DP camps,
traveled many thousands of ghosts, perhaps millions of ghosts. They dwelt
among us survivors in our humble and hastily erected houses on leg-like
stills of concrete. We had places we could call home, we had a promise of
life, and that was great! But I had to learn to live with the ghosts of my
stepfather’s two daughters and of his first wife; and he, a traumatized
survivor of Dachau, had to put up with the shadow of my mother’s beloved
first husband, the father I lost when I was ten. And besides them we had the
ghosts of my grandparents, the one of my best childhood friend Samek
Epstein, and many others . . .
Such arrangements were normal. Most of our neighbors lived with entire
populations of lost parents, lost siblings, and lost children.
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We did our best to look like perfect families. We pretended to radiate
resilience and contentment, this was the order of the day. Our honor was at
stake. And although there was a cloud over our heads, because we were the
representatives of the six millions of victims that had “allowed themselves to
be slaughtered like sheep. . .” (yes, this was the literal voicing of a popular
reproach) we never gave up on the imperative to reestablish our credentials.
We knew that the miracle of a Jewish State was at stake. As for the terrible
weight of our collective loss, it had to be buried deep, deep inside. It should
wait. Anyway, there were no tools to deal with it. The ghosts who lived with
us became our silent partners, and we knew that we would pass them on to
the future generations.
The Israeli society of the 50s, which was keeping a lid on the pain of the
Shoah, didn’t make it easy on me. It took me years to integrate my sense of
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bereavement, and to live with it in peace. Luckily, the passing of time
brought some appeasement. Wandering from country to country, living
partially in Israel, partially in various European states, and now in the US,
my acute sense of loss turned into a vital part of my inner self. What I would
call my creative being has found ways to liberate its grief. I painted and
painted and painted. I also wrote a book, and other texts. I had countless
shows, countless publications . . .
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Looking back at my entire life I can conclude that my last sixty-five years
have been an ongoing therapy; an experience that I surely share with many
other artists. But I would like to believe that it was more than that; that my
art is more than a mere process of getting to feel better. Fortunately, the
many people who believe in my art reinforce in me this hope.
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I have arrived to my present mode of expression in the mid 60s, after years
of stylistic searching that included a period of youthful expressionism and a
later period of abstraction. My so-called “mature style” explores a kingdom
of metaphors, icons and symbols. Most of the symbols I use are easily
recognizable.
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Many of them are Jewish. Often the banality of many of these symbols I use
challenges my imagination. Indeed, I take the symbols that allow me tell my
stories and under the appearance of a classical style I incorporate them into
my paintings. I try to speak of things I regard as important. The quasirealism of my pictorial language enables me to communicate thoughts and
perplexities, painful remembrances and even deep hurts. The final result of
all this toil is a huge collection of works, a few hundred one-man shows, and
the unmistakable life of a wandering Jew. I assume it with pride.
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After the Star of David,
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the Tablets, Keys, Trees and Tombstones, came to me the figure of the
Warsaw Boy. In the last two or three decades numerous historians,
theologians and educators found much interest in the use of my pictorial
language as a visual means of teaching the history of the Holocaust.
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My seemingly other-worldly paintings, packed with catastrophic debris and
decipherable enigmas, permit them to show that history is not only a
chronicle of shattering facts, but also a moral and psychological
phenomenon, one that holds far-reaching implications. It goes without
saying that I feel very privileged to have contributed to such endeavors. I
had some occasions to observe how young people interacted with the
teachers who showed them images of my art and asked for their reaction. I
spoke with many students at museums of universities that had set up my
shows. I saw how the adolescent and inexperienced, at times innocent and
naïve souls tried to grasp the extremes of human behavior, the irrevocability
of crucial choices, and man’s potential to do good or evil. Thus my various
symbols, and among them the Warsaw Boy, became part of their learning
process.
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This wasn’t a matter of aesthetics. My art was being used to awaken their
capacity of perception, touch their feelings, bring them historical
enlightenment, arouse their reflections and trigger discussions. I have seen
how young people, whether Caucasian, Afro-American or Asian, identify
with the Warsaw boy. For them he isn’t an exclusively Jewish emblem.
Rather a signal of a timely warning on a universal scale. Also I perceive in
him an iconic dimension. Not unlike the images and sounds that are parts of
what I imagine as being the building blocks of our civilization, which to me
remain ageless.
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The names of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven belong to that kind. I cannot
imagine an epoch in history without their music. I tell myself that their
music must have existed since time immemorial; all they had to do was to
open the respective shutters of their inner ear . . . And that is the feeling I
have when I look at the photo of the Warsaw Boy. On one hand I know that
it is the uncontested symbol of the Jewish Holocaust, and that it was a finger
of a Nazi officer that had opened the shutter of a camera’s inner eye and
immortalized the Jewish child. But on the other hand I believe that this boy’s
grandeur comes from and belongs to eternity. And the reason is that human
history is a cruel enterprise. For endless centuries children have been
savagely sacrificed, and fallen victims to unimaginable genocides, to brutal
wars, and to tribal feuds. Such horrors happened before the time of the
Warsaw Boy, after his time, and they go on happening now -- all over the
world
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Was this the way I perceived the photo when I first saw it published? True, it
instantly seized my attention with its transcending force. I also remember
that I carefully examined the entire group of participants, as if they were
players in a passion play, frozen in postures that made up an unexpected
perfection of pictorial composition. But it was the lonely figure of the boy
that sank into my heart.
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I do not know whether the actual Warsaw Boy perished or not; over the
years more than one person has claimed to be he -- it hardly matters. In the
world of today’s famous images, the Warsaw Ghetto Boy is as iconic as the
Mona Lisa of Da Vinci, the Sunflowers of Van Gogh, or Warhol’s Marilyn,
if not more so. His image screams louder than Munch’s Scream. He is the
Jewish crucifixion. His helpless figure is more captivating than Chagall’s
Jew nailed to a cross with the prayer-shawl tied around his loins and the
images of desolation that surround him.
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Because of all that the much-published, trivialized, and at times politically
abused photograph of the Warsaw Boy has become to me a source of
inspiration. With his arms lifted in an attitude of resignation and surrender,
and his depleted gaze focused on my eyes, he never stops questioning me.
Perhaps I should reassure you that he is well and alive and that he has
recently moved to my studio, where he functions as my live model.
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But getting him into my paintings wasn’t an easy task. On my part it
demanded some maturation as well as courage. Just the popularity and overexposure of his image made me reluctant. But there was a personal bond
between him and me, and it was of consequence. In the Vilna Ghetto I was
his age and I looked – as did thousands of other children destined for the
same fate – exactly like him. Same cap, same outgrown coat, same short
pants. I always considered this picture a kind of portrait of myself in those
times.
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This may be a presumptuous thought since -- as I said -- we do not know if
the authentic boy survived, whereas I did. However, his tragic figure that
represents more than a million murdered Jewish children radiated an aura of
holiness. For a long time I studied this sacred image, lived in its presence,
but was afraid to make it part of my pictorial world. Its authenticity had an
incredible power. I dared not challenge it. Besides, I have always found
insufferable those books, movies and paintings that sentimentalize the
Holocaust, and I feared this boy as if he were a trap.
The passing of time made me reconsider. The western world began erecting
monuments to the Holocaust. Many such projects are still in the making. Some
are impressive, but many are puzzling if not painfully inadequate; the
magnitude of the subject often defeats our creativity. Moreover, memorials that
speak specifically to a given generation usually become dated. At times the
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locations chosen for them undergo profound changes. I began to wish for
monuments that would be temporary, or at least transportable.
I knew that in reality such monuments could not exist, but I could paint them.
The Warsaw Boy came to my help. In order to reflect more deeply on all these
complex issues, I decided to paint him in a series of small canvases that would
be dedicated to his memory. I painted impossible memorials, tombstones of
sorts, humble and perishable “reliquaries,” made of rubble, cutouts and
throwaways. All of them called up his ghostlike presence. Such were the only
tangible markings of memory that I could produce. Thus the boy from Warsaw,
my new friend, this alter ego of mine, began emerging in my canvases, and
suddenly I painted him again and again. With time I began to feel that not
fifteen or twenty such imagined tombstones should arise in these nonexistent
cemeteries, but an entire million.
In the last fifteen years I have painted over one hundred such canvases. Some
remain small, other expand in size. Can one give individual faces to such a
multitude of children? I tried, first in my mind, sometimes on my canvases.
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Whenever I look at these paintings I see in them my closest childhood friend,
Samek Epstein. We were born the same year, and we both bore the same
diminutive of the Hebrew name Shmuel, or Samuel, which in Polish became
Samek. In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Vilna, the Lithuanian police
discovered the eight-year-old Samek hiding in the home of a Christian woman.
They dragged him to the courtyard and shot him. His body was left for hours in
a puddle of blood as a warning to any other Jews who might try to remain
outside the Ghetto.
Is it vain of me to hope that through my art I can somehow live now for the
two of us, for Samek and for myself, and that in this way his obliterated future
will not have been totally lost. Alive in my mind and work, he and the Ghetto
boy help me safeguard the memory of all of those martyred children, the entire
million and more. And as I said, the more time passes, and the more I see how
very little the world is ready to learn from past mistakes, the more this boy
transcends the Jewish tragedy and ends up representing a universal one.
Mourning is a universal experience. The loss of a child, a parent, a spouse or a
friend – these are forever-shattering events. But holding on to the memory of a
given face, personality, or story; cementing into one’s memory a specific web
of relationships; -- these acts afford some kind of afterlife to those who are
gone. Our ability to remember gives us pain but also consolation, and it helps
us to accept grief. When people deal with inevitable loss, established rituals
can help. Sharing one’s sorrow with others helps to ease it. The well-known
tradition of the shivah, the Jewish seven days of mourning, helps people to
acknowledge their bereavement.
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It is very different when one is faced with the need to mourn the loss of
thousands or millions. The Shoah exposes us to this test. The most attentive
commemorations of historical facts, and the richest collections of artifacts,
cannot help us to integrate what our human conscience refuses to accept.
Let us not forget that the pounding of the machinery of our subconscious
isn’t so very easily oiled and appeased. I believe that just as the destruction
of the Temple has created in the Jewish culture and religion a body of
clearly defined public rituals of mourning, so today’s art, literature and
music may well seek to provide openings for the collective awareness of a
loss that defies all rational explanation. I am looking at the sad eyes of my
friend from Warsaw, and I think that he agrees with me.
Samuel Bak,
Weston, June 2008