On 28 July 1929, Yehuda Bacon was born in Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, into an Orthodox Jewish family. He turns 97 this year. That he survived to this age is, by any measure, extraordinary.
In September 1942, aged just 13, he was deported to Theresienstadt. In December 1943 he and his father were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he pulled wagons laden with the bodies of the dead and drew secretly on scraps of paper, hiding his drawings before inspections. His father was murdered in the gas chambers in 1944. On 18 January 1945 he left Auschwitz on the Death March and was liberated at Gunskirchen, near Mauthausen, on 5 May 1945, aged fifteen.
After the war he studied art in Prague, Jerusalem, London, Paris and New York, taught at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and testified at both the Eichmann Trial and the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt. He has never stopped creating.
LBI London holds a particular treasure connected to him: his 1955 woodcut portrait of Rabbi Leo Baeck, our institute’s namesake. Both men passed through Theresienstadt, and the portrait carries the weight of that shared experience. It has become one of the most recognisable images associated with LBI London.
Researchers wishing to understand the world Bacon survived can consult the LBI London library collection at Senate House Library in Bloomsbury. The collection includes Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft by H.G. Adler, the definitive study of the ghetto where Bacon was held, as well as Kinder mit dem gelben Stern: Europa 1933-1945 by Deborah Dwork, a moving account of the experience of Jewish children across Nazi-occupied Europe.
On his birthday, we honour his courage, his witness, and his art.
Find out more about our collections: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/library
