On the 11th November 2013 the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town opened a retrospective exhibition of the highest calibre. Samuel Bak, a world renowned artist, will for the first time, present a retrospective exhibition of his life’s work.

Bak was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1933. At the age of 8 he was caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust as the Nazi’s invaded Lithuania. He and his family were forced into the Jewish Ghetto, where at the age of 9, he held his first exhibition.

By sheer chance, luck, coincidence, and the resoluteness of his parents, he managed to survive the war. Although his grandparents and father were killed, Samuel and his mother stayed alive, twice being sheltered by caring nuns in the St Catherine Convent of the Roman Catholic Benedictine order who endangered their own existence by hiding them.