The Jew nailed to the Cross, his prayer-shawl tied around his loins, his figure surrounded by images of desolation and despair: this is Chagall's extraordinary symbol of Jewish martyrology. Yet to me the iconic and much-published Holocaust photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy remains the most poignant image of Jewish Crucifixion.

With his arms lifted in an attitude of resigned and bewildered surrender, and his depleted gaze focused on my eyes, he has never stopped questioning me. In the Vilna Ghetto I was his age and I looked - as did thousands of other children destined for the same fate - exactly like him. Same cap, same outgrown coat, same short pants. I always considered this picture a kind of portrait of myself in those times. This may be a presumptuous thought, since we do not know if the authentic boy survived -- whereas I did.

Over the years his tragic figure has become a universal emblem of the million children murdered in the Shoah. For a long time I studied this boy's sacred image, lived in its presence, but was afraid to make it part of my pictorial world. I dared not challenge the terrible power of the photograph's authenticity.

The passing of time made me reconsider. The western world began erecting monuments to the Holocaust. Many such projects are still in the making. A few are impressive, but others are puzzling if not sadly inadequate; the magnitude of the subject often defeats our creativity. Moreover, memorials that speak specifically to a given generation usually become dated, even pitiable. Perhaps monuments should be temporary, or at least transportable.

In order to reflect more deeply on these complex issues, I decided to paint a series of small canvases. I painted impossible memorials, monuments that could never exist. Tombstones of sorts, humble "reliquaries," unassuming cutouts, and perishable bricolages that called up the ghostlike presence of the Warsaw boy. Such were the only tangible markings of memory that I could produce.

Thus the boy from Warsaw, this alter ego of mine, emerged in my canvases, and I painted him again and again. As if the process of letting him materialize on my paintings could supply us both with answers to some of the endless questions that linger in my mind. With time, intensely focusing on this project, I began to feel that not fifteen or twenty such imagined tombstones should arise in these nonexistent cemeteries, but an entire million.

Can one give an individual face to such a multitude of children? I tried, not on my canvases but in my mind. Whenever I look at these paintings I see in them my childhood pal Samek Epstein. We were born the same year, and we both bore the same diminutive of the Hebrew name Shmuel, or Samuel, which in Polish became Samek. In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Vilna, the Lithuanian police discovered the eight-year-old Samek hiding in the home of a Christian woman. They dragged him to the courtyard and shot him. His body was left for hours in a puddle of blood as a warning to any other Jews who might try to remain outside the Ghetto.

Is it vain of me to hope that through my art I can somehow live now for the two of us, for Samek and for myself, and that in this way his obliterated future will not have been totally lost? Alive in my mind and work, he and the Ghetto boy help me safeguard the memory of all of those martyred children, the entire million.

Text by Samuel Bak, from Between Worlds: The Paintings of Samuel Bak from 1946-2000.