The Cold Shower of a New Life: The Postwar Diaries of a Child Survivor, Volume 7 - July 13, 1947 – September 6, 1947

"Rejoice, forget! When every day some ignoramus asks where I got the number
on my arm, and will it eventually disappear?" (September, 3, 1947)

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 December 1943, he was sent to Auschwitz- Birkenau, where he was interned in the family camp, and, 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; aside from one sister who had left Czechoslovakia before the war, his entire family was murdered. Upon returning to Czechoslovakia, Bacon lived in a provisionary youth home run by the humanist Přemysl Pitter. In 1946, he immigrated to Eretz Israel and embarked on studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, later becoming a professor of graphics and drawing and achieving fame as an artist.
These notebooks tell the story of a young survivor exploring his emotional and physical challenges after intense suffering, discovering his strengths and abilities as he builds a life after the Shoah.

This seventh volume of the series covers Bacon’s summer vacation from his studies at Bezalel. He travels the country, visiting friends and relatives, encountering new sights and experiences, before returning to the reality and struggles of life in Jerusalem. Written during tumultuous and dramatic times in the history of Zionism and the Yishuv, the organized Jewish community in Eretz Israel, as the sun gradually set on pre-independence British rule, in his diary Bacon articulates his challenges and struggles—life as a young student, memories of the war, the enduring and haunting pain of his personal losses as well as the dramatic and often violent events unfolding around him. His words, accompanied by sketches, offer a profound documentation of the destruction, his personal world, and his tremendous efforts to create a life of value and meaning.