The Cold Shower of a New Life

Words to remember, drawings to heal: A legendary artist’s lifelong journey of rebuilding from the ashes.

These notebooks tell the story of a young survivor exploring his emotional and physical challenges after intense suffering, while discovering his strengths and abilities as he builds a life after the Holocaust. The writings reflect the author’s inner dialogue regarding the meaning of his existence, and his conversations, real and imagined, with his lost loved ones, contemporaries, and former fellow camp inmates with whom he shared his darkest hours. 

In this eighth volume, which includes notebooks 15 and 16, Bacon resumes his studies after the summer break. In these diaries he questions his artistic talent, is concerned over his financial and emotional state and devotes time to contemplating his relationships. He describes the announcement of the partition in November 1947 and the ensuing civil war in Mandatory Palestine. These notebooks provide a rare insight into how a young survivor experienced these fraught political times in the months leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel.

World-renowned Israeli artist and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bacon began keeping a diary in July 1945, while living in a youth home in Štiřín, Czechoslovakia, shortly after his liberation. During the past seven decades, Bacon has filled over 240 notebooks. His diary is a mosaic of words and drawings through which he remembers his past, contemplates his present, and imagines his future. Bacon was born in Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. In 1942, aged thirteen, he was deported with his family to Theresienstadt. In 1943 he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was interned in the family camp; a few months later, he was among a group of teens selected to work as forced laborers. Bacon survived death marches to Mauthausen and Gunskirchen before he was finally liberated, only to discover that his family had been murdered, aside from one sister who had left Czechoslovakia before the war. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia, Bacon lived in a provisionary youth home run by the humanist Přemysl Pitter. In 1946, Bacon immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, later becoming a professor of graphics and drawing, and achieving fame as an artist.

Dr. Sharon Kangisser Cohen is the Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Studies and the Director of the Eli and Diana Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research. Formerly Director of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, she holds a PhD from Hebrew University in the field of Holocaust Studies. She has published numerous articles relating to the postwar lives of Holocaust survivors and rehabilitation after trauma.

Dr. Dorota Julia Nowak is a Slavic scholar and a graduate of the Holocaust Studies program at the University of Haifa in Israel. She holds a PhD from Palacky University in Olomouc. Within Slavic studies, she focuses on Holocaust literature and Jewish issues in general. At Palacký University in the Czech Republic, she lectures on the history of Polish literature and teaches courses on Jewish culture in Poland and Polish feminist thought.