Sam Bak is a prolific contemporary painter who uses paint and a visual icon language to share his harrowing Holocaust experience having grown up in Vilnius, Lithuania. His work has been shown around the world, and is represented by the Pucker Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston.
In 2024, author Chris Heath wrote No Road Leading Back, documenting the story of the Polish village of Ponar, aka Vilnius, including Bak’s family story.
Join Heath and Bak in conversation with Alexandra Cardon, Chief Curator, Samuel Bak Museum: the Learning Center, University of Nebraska, to dig into this story and see Sam’s paintings in the context of this important and powerful story.
Program is presented by the Pucker Gallery in collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves, the Vilna Shul, and Congregation Kehillath Israel.
About the book
No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.