“Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. 'The unknown person' inside of them is our hope for the future.”
Janusz Korczak
Approximately one-and-a-half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust; few survived. Some children were able to escape by hiding — finding shelter wherever possible, constantly in fear of being discovered and dependent on the occasional goodwill of strangers. Other children survived by concealing their identities, facing constant fear and danger, where a wrong word could lead to discovery and death.
Unbelievably, as they struggled to hold on to life, many Jewish children attempted to maintain their childhood and youth by creating for themselves a different reality from that which surrounded them. They made makeshift toys, drew scenes of their new reality or from their imagination, wrote letters, poems and diaries, and clung to any remaining vestige of their homes. In many cases, it was the children who gave their parents the encouragement and hope to continue their desperate daily fight for survival.
To mark International Children's Day, and to answer the high demand for material on the experience of Jewish children during the Shoah, Yad Vashem launched a new online exhibition in November 2019, entitled "Children in the Holocaust." The exhibition features children's toys, games, artworks, letters, diaries and albums, all carefully preserved in Yad Vashem's Collections, and which appear across the Yad Vashem website as part of other online presentations on a variety of Holocaust-related topics. In addition, the new exhibition brings testimonies from survivors who shared their childhood experiences from before, during and immediately after the Holocaust.
Below are a selection of some of the items featured in the new exhibition:
Memories of Home
In the Debrecen ghetto, Hungary, Leah Burnstein made a dollhouse with figurines in the image of her parents, as a souvenir of the home from which they were deported. Leah was sent to the Strasshof Concentration Camp in Austria. In the camp, Leah found a book cover with which she covered her cardboard "house." Leah survived and immigrated to Eretz Israel, bringing her "childhood home" with her. The dollhouse is included in the ready2print exhibition "Stars Without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust."
Art as Testimony
Born in Prague in 1929, Petr Ginz was a multi-talented youth, who drew and wrote essays, short stories and poems from an early age. Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was expelled from school due to the racial laws. In 1942, he was deported to Terezin where he continued to draw and write. Together with friends in the youth barracks, Ginz edited and published the clandestine newspaper Vedem (We Are Leading). In the fall of 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered immediately upon arrival. This artwork appears in the Education and E-Learning section of the Yad Vashem website, in the teacher-training video entitled "Artists of Terezin."
Efforts to Connect
"My beloved mother, I am writing to you. I want to see you…" These words are taken from the last letter of 13-year-old Hersch Paluch, sent from the Końskie ghetto in 1941, to his mother Helena in Argentina. Hersch was murdered in Treblinka in 1942, despite desperate efforts by his mother to secure a visa for him to Argentina. The letter appears in the online exhibition, "We Shall Meet Again: Last Letters from the Holocaust, 1941."
Capturing a Moment
Stefa Fromer and Jasia Gandz met in the children home in Otwock, Poland, after the war. Jasia Gandz was the second child to arrive in the home. By June 1945 approximately 130 child survivors were living in the home. Most of the educators and staff were also Holocaust survivors, who saw in their work a sense of mission and destiny, an answer to the loss they had experienced in the Holocaust. The photograph is part of the online exhibition, "A Time to Heal: The Story of the Children's Home in Otwock, Poland."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 91.
