As I’ve mentioned before, as much as I love Maine and as much as I hope to return to my native soil to live someday, I will never regret the years spent away from Maine because of all the different people I’ve been able to meet along the way. One such person is a woman I was asked to write a story about, Hedi Bak.
I was working at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center at the time when I was approached to meet and interview Hedi for a story in a publication called IDENTITY, from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Minneapolis. It was to be a story about her as the artist and the person behind the art she called Song of Songs, a suite of 30 wood block lithographs illustrating the most famous “love poem” of all time. This big body of work was purchased by Hedi’s friend, Dr. Gisela Konopka, and then donated to the JCC in Minneapolis.
I met with Hedi one afternoon at the center and sat down to hear her story; and what a story it was. She was a German youth living in Germany during WWII. I was anxious to hear her side of the story, so to speak. After all, my own mother was of German Dutch descent, and here we were talking about that terrible war; that horrible era of Nazism, here in the Atlanta Jewish Community Center, surrounded by people of the Jewish faith. I became good friends with Hedi after that interview and we spent many hours talking about the past and about her hopes for the future.
This is the resulting story which I give you in excerpt form. It was written in 1986. She was in her 60s at that time, therefore she would be in her 80s now if she is still living. I lost track of her when she found a new love and moved to Africa with him.
The Woman Behind the Art:
Hedi Bak’s “Song of Songs” By Sandra Sylvester
In the 1960s the flower children were rebelling against the Vietnam War. Flower children shouted, “Make love, not war!” Hedi Bak, remembering her youth during another war in another time, felt she had to respond to these children of the “love generation” in the only way she could. She decided to create the Song of Songs, a suite of wood block lithographs illustrating the most famous “love poem” of all time.
Unlike the Vietnam protestors, including her own son, Bak felt her youth was stolen from her. In the period when young people traditionally “discover love,” she was living through WWII as a German youth in Germany.
Bak’s family were demonstrators of a sort also. At that time she lived with her father’s family, the Mullers, in the French border town of Pirmasens. Her father was a member of the opposition party, the Social Democrats. The family, therefore, endured many hardships and discriminatory actions. Mr. Muller was arrested in 1933 when Hedi was only eight. He was later sent to Dachau, but was released because of his heroism in rescuing a woman from the rubble of an Allied air raid.
Enduring broken glass and red paint, or blood, splattered on their house by their neighbors, the family became a “safe house” or you might say, a part of an underground railroad, for those fleeing the Nazis. Jews, political opponents and other “enemies of the Third Reich” passed through the house in the middle of the night.
One night they were raided by the SS, who found nothing, because Hedi’s aunt locked herself in a third floor bedroom and hid incriminating papers in the shingles of the house by reaching through a dormer window. Hedi has bitter memories though of how those refugees were forced to hide from the French on the French side of the border, in fear of being turned back by them.
Hedi witnessed many atrocities against the Jews, most notably Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—in November of 1938, as she ran up and down outdoor stairs and hid behind barrels not believing what she was seeing. The mob burned books, broke the windows of Jewish shops. Amid it all was the further misbelief as she saw her own second cousin leading a Hitler Youth Group band as they marched through the glass. Her family did not talk about that incident for years afterwards.
The Muller family was in temporary exile in the backwoods of the Main River, returning after the fall of France in 1941 to face a belligerent German population. Her grandfather died during this time and Hedi and her grandmother moved to Kaiserslautern to live with a cousin. Hedi was able to enroll as a pre-architectural student at the Meisterschule fur Kunsthandwerk.
This lull was short-lived, however, as she was drafted into the P.A.D. (work camp) in 1942. She endured hard work in the fields while having to deal with less than friendly farm families. Food was scarce and workers had to depend on roots and berries very often.
One day in the camp, when she was in charge of a group of small children, the Allied bombers came and she had to hurry to get them safely hidden under bushes. She was released from the camp after six months because of ill health and returned home where she was reassigned to a factory. Her background helped her get a job in the drafting department.
As the war was ending the factory was ordered to move deeper into Germany because of increased Allied bombing. Hedi refused to go and was therefore ordered to report to the FLAK commander in Fuerth for military training. She was escorted to the train by armed militia along with some other women. She soon deserted, however, as the war drew to a close.
Life soon became a search for family members, friends and food. Hedi wandered over much of Germany during this time. Most of her family survived. Ninety per cent of Pirmasens was destroyed.
Hedi returned to school after the war where she met her future husband, Bronislaw Bak. Bak was a Polish soldier at age 17. As Poles were hated in Germany, along with most other foreigners, and Hedi had lost faith in her own country’s political future, the couple decided to come to America under the displaced persons program.
They settled in Chicago, opened their own printmakers’ workshop and raised three sons. They moved to Minnesota in 1961, where they became naturalized American citizens. Bronislaw became an internationally known designer/artist and a college professor. Hedi has published a book about the Song of Songs and completed a book on the prayer of St. Francis. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Argentina and the United States.
The Baks moved to Georgia in the 70s where Bronislaw became a professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. He died in 1981. Hedi lives in Atlanta (until she moved to Africa). Sadly she lost one son in an accident and an operation left her partially paralyzed and unable to practice her printmaking art. She does however, continue with her drawings and teaches workshops. She has begun to write her memoirs of her childhood in Germany. She was presented at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta with her exhibit, “Faces and Places.”
Hedi endured a lot in her childhood and young adulthood. As she says, “You are stronger for what you must endure in life.” Her work, Song of Songs is on permanent display in the JCC Auditorium in Minneapolis.
Thanks for listening.
A note: If I have readers in Africa, and you by chance have known Hedi Bak at some time, please tell me. I’ve always wondered how my friend, Hedi Bak, is doing.
GUESS WHAT?
GUESS WHAT?
I just did a Google search and found Hedi through her art. She is actually now living in the U.S. either in Oak Ridge, TN or Woodstock, GA., which is not that far from me. I'll report more when I actually talk to her. I just love making contact with old friends. Stay tuned.
Another work from the same volume of IDENTITY:
The Survivors
Dedicated to my Grandparents
By Jacob Fine
The Holocaust destroyed the Jewish People
Like a fire can destroy a forest.
Some animals get hurt by the fire
Like Jews sent to gas chambers.
But Some Survive!
Like birds with strong wings
Who make it past the smoke
Like deer with swift and sturdy legs
Who run to save their lives
Like bears who climb the highest trees
To escape the burning fire.
Now it’s over, no more fire
The people left are called Survivors
With children of their own, they start new lives
Like forests that begin to grow again.
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