Summary

Zako - was the name German soldiers gave to the Soviet Armenian painter, Sargis Mangasaryan. Thanks to his creative gifts, Zako prevailed and survived the hell of WWII military camps.Zako endured by drawing portraits of his tormentors. He tried to escape several times, but each time landed in another harsher camp. After the war, he risked exile to Siberia, as he was a prisoner of war, he was considered a traitor to the Soviet Union. He created several huge portraits of Stalin to earn him passage home to Soviet Armenia.Some years later, in 1956, Zako visits the famous Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow with his friends. He realized how undeveloped his portrait drawings had remained all those years. Although he was fighting for his physical freedom throughout, his artistic evolution was stunted within the system.