Yehuda Bacon
Yehuda Bacon (born on July 28 1929 in Ostrava) is an Israeli artist. (Occasional script, especially in German Jehuda Bacon, sometimes Yehuda Bakon.)
Life until 1945
Yehuda Bacon was born as a son of a Hasidic ( Orthodox Jewish) family.
In the fall of 1942, at age 13, Bacon was deported with his family from Ostrava to the Ghetto Theresienstadt, where he shared a romm with [[George Brady (Holocaust survivor) | George Brady. Among others he was part of the children's opera Brundibár.
In December 1943, he was deported to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he and other imprisoned children were used to bedazzle the International Committee of the Red Cross in the so-called "family camp". In fact, the "Birkenau Boys" were used for transport work in the entire complex of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In June 1944, Bacon sees his father murdered in the gas chambers. At this time, his mother and his sister Hanna were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, where they died a few weeks before liberation.
On January 18, 1945 Bacon was set on a Death March, which led him through the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp to its subcamp Gunskirchen. After three days in the winter Three days does the death march in the winter of 1945 took to Mauthausen. In March 1945, Bacon was sent on another death march to a subcamp of Mauthausen, Gunskirchen, in the woods. As he reports, there was no food, water or clothing.
On May 5, 1945 Bacon was liberated by the US Army. Before the SS guards left the camp, they had poisoned the rest of the food. Many inmates had died from the effects of high food supply, which the body could not absorb anymore. Bacon and his friend Wolfie Adler (who later became an Israeli rabbi and published a book about his experiences) left the camp. U.S. soldieres brought them to a hospital in the Austrian town Steyr.
Bacon drove back to Prague after he recovered more or less in the convent runned by Catholic nuns. He hoped to see his mother and sisters there again. He lived in an orphanage not far from Prague which was established by the Czech educator and humanist Přemysl Pitter. Through him, he found a way to life after the liberation.
Live after liberation and migration to Israel
After liberation, Bacon decided to become an artist - to process his experiences and also to try to describe what he lived through. As a survivor he feels a responsibility to tell his story and to teach to future generations to make them aware of their responsibility in the present and the future. He was among the first survivors of the Shoah, which again set foot on German soil.
In 1946 Bacon migrated with the help of the Youth Aliyah to then Palestine. There he studied at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where he also was appointed as a professor of graphic and drawing in 1959, after several stuy visits in Paris and London.
The drawings which show details and sequences of what he saw during his time in the concentration camps and which he already made as a teenager shortly after the liberation as well as his testimony served as evidence in trails agains Nazi criminals (including the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials) and were also used in the litigation against Holocaust denier David Irving, who challenges the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz.
His Œuvre consists of a fascinating interaction: on the one hand, Bacon processes the experiences of his childhood and youth in the concentration camps, on the other he is searching for a way of understanding through his art. Yehuda Bacon was early part of interfaith dialogues and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in the 1950s.
Bacon´s art is shown in several museums and collections around the world, among the Israel Museum and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Congress in Washington D.C., in the homes of Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Martin Buber and Chaim Weizmann as well as in London. Numerous exhibitions have taken him to Germany, the USA and the UK.
Who was in hell knows that there is no alternative for the better.
The problem of evil is in every person, almost everyone: the danger of inhumanity ...
Yehuda Bacon lives with his wife Leah Bacon in Jerusalem.