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Yehudah Bakon was born in Moravska Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) on July 28, 1929.
He attended the Jewish school in the city, continuing with his studies there even after the Nazi occupation, when Jewish children were excluded from social or educational activities. In the fall of 1942, together with his family, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and from there to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp in December, 1943. His family subsequently became part of the so-called Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau. Yehudah survived the liquidation of the family camp by being selected to be a member of the “Birkenau Boys“, a small group of boys used by the Nazi camp administration (a little unclear).
In January 1945, before Auschwitz was liberated, he was taken on a death march and deported to Mauthausen. He was liberated by the United States Armed Forces at Gunskirchen, an ancillary camp of Mauthausen. Bakon returned to Czechoslovakia and as an orphan became part of a unique social rehabilitation program of Přemysl Pitter. In 1946, he decided to emigrate to Palestine. There, he studied and later taught at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Art Academy. He is known as a painter and a graphic artist. He lives and works in Jerusalem.
He was interviewed in Jerusalem in 1996.