Yehuda Bacon (b. 1929), In Memory of the Czech Transport to the Gas Chambers, 1945, Charcoal on paper

Yehuda Bacon was born in Czechoslovakia to a Chassidic family. In 1941, he was sent to Theresienstadt at the age of thirteen, where he began to draw. Whilst in Theresienstadt, he studied under the direction of artists Otto Unger, Bedrich Fritta and Leo Hass. In 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz. He emigrated to Eretz Israel with the Youth Aliya in 1946, studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and then continued his studies in Italy, London, New York and Paris. In 1961 he testified at the Eichmann trial. Bacon lectured in the art department of Haifa University and at the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem.

A short time following his liberation from Auschwitz, the sixteen-year-old Bacon drew this portrait of his father who perished in the death camp. Like a necromancer, Bacon conjures up the thin, exhausted face and blazing eyes of his father, the disembodied face ascending from the smoke. The image of the father whose life was ended in the furnaces of Auschwitz is reconstructed by the son who still remembers the father he was recently separated from. This recollection will never be eradicated since Bacon committed it to paper. The turbulent mental state of the artist is manifested by the agitated, quivering lines surrounding the portrait. In the lower section of the drawing, where we would expect to see his father's body, we detect the crematoria and a body hanging off the barbed wire fence which surrounded the camp. In the right-hand corner, the artist has added the date and time: 10.VII.44, 22:00 - marking the exact moment when his father perished.