The Ghetto

This large work is one in a series of paintings and drawings Samuel Bak made in the mid 1970s as variations on the subject of the Ghetto. In this picture, narrow and windowless stone buildings are clustered in a desert landscape. In the center, a void opens up in the shape of the Star of David, exposing the crammed structures of the ghetto beneath. On the lower left, almost hidden in the orange rocks and pebbles, is the artist’s signature and date: BAK 1976

The artist himself called this “a portable memorial of the Shoah”— a fitting definition, also given the painting’s wandering for years through various exhibitions in German museums. The image’s expressive force was the reason for the choice by historian Ytzhak Arad to feature it on the cover of his Ghetto in Flames, a 1980 book on the history of Vilna Jews during the Holocaust.