Samuel Bak’s Biography

Samuel Bak was born on August 2, 1933, in Vilna (or Vilnius), Poland. A few years later, the area was incorporated into the independent republic of Lithuania. Bak was eight when the Germans invaded in 1941 and established a ghetto for the Jewish population. At first he and his parents hid in a local monastery; when the Germans grew suspicious, they escaped to the ghetto. Bak began painting as a young child, and, prompted by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, he held his first exhibition in the Vilna Ghetto in 1942 at the age of nine. From the ghetto, the family was sent to a labor camp on the outskirts of the city. His mother escaped and took refuge with a distant relative who had converted to Christianity and was living undetected in Vilna. Then Bak’s father managed to save his son by dropping him in a sack out of a ground-floor window of the warehouse where he was working; Bak was met by a maid and brought to the house where his mother was hiding. His father was shot by the Germans in July 1944, a few days before Soviet troops liberated the city. His four grandparents had been executed earlier at Ponary, the killing site in the forest outside of Vilna. 

After the war, the young Bak continued painting at a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany (1945–1948). He also studied painting in Munich, and in 1948, he and his mother immigrated to Israel, where he studied for a year at the Bezalel art school in Jerusalem. After fulfilling his military service, he spent three years (1956–1959) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He then moved to Rome (1959– 1966), returned to Israel (1966–1974), and lived for a time in New York City (1974–1977). There followed years in Israel and Paris, then a long stay (1984–1993) in Switzerland. Since 1993, Bak has lived and worked in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.

Samuel Bak’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries and hang in public collections in England, the United States, Israel, Germany, and Switzerland. Many recent works may be viewed at the Pucker Gallery in Boston.