We all have at least one key. If you have a key, it means you have a house, you have your corner, and finally you have somewhere you keep your most important things. We should appreciate all these things, this sense of safety, because there are people, like Samuel Bak, who have lost the world that was familiar to them – both people and material things – when they were only children.

When anyone who had helped the family a lot visited Bak’s house, the artist’s mother would hold them back and say: ‘Wait, let me wipe the dust from your wings.’ Bak and his mother survived only thanks to the efforts of the Righteous who hid them and thus risked their own lives. Knowing that there are people among us who are angels incarnate inspires great respect and we feel gratitude to those who embody humanistic values and compassion for their neighbour.

There was only one tree that grew in the Vilna Ghetto. The eyes of the ghetto prisoners, long-ing for greenery and nature, kept turning to it. The artist remembers it as a play tree. Fenced, this single tree in the ghetto territory represented the whole world, a separate microcosm: beetles, ants and ladybirds crawled up and down its trunk, birds chirped in its crown, and the sun played in its leaves. All this aroused the imagination of the little artist, including his hope for a different world.

Chess is a rational game. In reality, the movers and shakers of the world move people as if they were chess pieces. People are constantly taking risks by making life choices or moves. Bak’s Chess series reveals yet another issue, which is that things can change in an instant. The world that the artist knew as a child, the world where life obeyed certain rational laws was swept away by the Holocaust.

Samuel Bak emphasises that it was impossible for a Jewish boy born in Vilnius in 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany, to survive in that era. It took ten miracles out of ten for him and his mother to survive, unlike all four of his grandparents and father who perished. Such success takes more than just the enormous effort of the person himself. It takes many fateful coincidences and huge help on the part of strangers who risk their lives. Father Juozas Stakauskas, teacher Vladas Žemaitis and nun Marija Mikulska became such people for Bak.

By painting cups, plates, spoons, and vases, Bak seemingly tells us that we need to appreciate the simple things in life that surround us all the time. Everyday things are a metaphor for the lost world – simple and yet so cosy. A safe idyllic world where tea is poured from a beautiful teapot and a spoon is simply used to mix sugar. When painting vessels scattered in the streets, the artist speaks about the world that has disappeared, and by gluing the vessels together again, he asks: ‘Is it possible to recreate THE world anew?’

Whatever city he saw before his eyes, be it Rome, New York or Lausanne, its landscape would be presented on canvas according to the proportions of Vilnius: ‘One way or another, I have been drawing Vilnius my whole life. I saw Vilnius as a child and I still follow these impressions, these proportions between the window and walls, between houses and streets in my artwork’, says Samuel Bak. While living in New York in the 1970s and seeing the jungle of skyscrapers of a megapolis before his eyes, Samuel Bak created a series of paintings titled Return to Vilnius devoted to the Vilna Ghetto.
How crucial a hometown (home area) can be in the lives of each of us. And no matter what memories bind us to it.

When are we driven out of paradise: when we are born, when we mature, when the unhappy, eye-opening first love ends? We all have experiences from which we would like to protect our paradice Pear in order to preserve its sweet unadulterated taste – the memory of our paradise and the opportunity to return there someday. The Adam and Eve of Samuel Bak seem to no longer remember the taste of their paradise, but know that there are beautiful things in this tough imperfect world that are worth respecting and appreciating.