Yehuda Bacon

Yehuda Bacon (Hebrew: יהודה בקון‎‎; born July 28, 1929 in Ostrava) is an Israeli artist who survived the Holocaust.

Yehuda Bacon was born into a Hasidic (Orthodox Jewish) family. In the fall of 1942, at the age of 13, Bacon was deported with his family from Ostrava to the Ghetto Theresienstadt, where he shared a room with George Brady. In Theresienstadt he played in the children's opera Brundibár. In December 1943, he was deported to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he and other imprisoned children were used to bedazzle the International Committee of the Red Cross in the so-called "family camp". In fact, the "Birkenau Boys" were used for transport work in the entire complex of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

In June 1944, Bacon saw his father murdered in the gas chambers. At this time, his mother and his sister Hanna were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, where they died a few weeks before its liberation. On January 18, 1945 Bacon was sent on the camp's death march, which lasted three days and led him through the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp to its subcamp Gunskirchen. In March, Bacon was sent on another death march to a subcamp of Mauthausen, Gunskirchen, in the woods. As he reports, there was no food, water or clothing. On May 5, 1945 Bacon was liberated by the US Army. Before the SS guards left the camp, they poisoned the rest of the food. Many inmates had died from the effects of high food supply, which their bodies could not absorb anymore. Bacon and his friend Wolfie Adler (who later became an Israeli rabbi and published a book about his experiences) left the camp. US soldiers brought them to a hospital in the Austrian town Steyr.

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