Holocaust exhibition memorializes 1.5 million children

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum opened an exhibition in Jerusalem on Wednesday, the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, to remember 1.5 million children, out of 6 million Jews, who were killed by Nazis in World War II.

The exhibition, "Children in the Holocaust: Stars Without a Heaven," depicts a "forest" of "trees" exhibiting personal stories of children, through childhood themes of friendship, playtime and family.


Credit: Reuters

Visitors walk through the exhibition that begins with displays illustrating the world of children before the Holocaust and during wartime.

"Children are in any given society the most vulnerable part of the society. On the one hand they are naive, they are unprotected, they need the world of the adults to protect them. But on the other hand they symbolize hope, the future. And those children have been murdered and we are asking ourselves -- did their murders affect, destroys the hope? Destroys the future? And the answer is no," said the museum chairman, Avner Shalev. "Their expressions are very naive, very direct and they can tell the story in a very creative deal without the filters that we as adults put about any way of expression. And this the strength of the world of the children," he added.

Many children were forced to become the breadwinners to struggle for survival during the Holocaust, but despite the grim reality they lived in, children still played, wrote and drew pictures, said exhibition curator Yehudit Inbar.

One of the personal stories on display is that of Marta Goren from then Poland, now western Ukraine. Marta was only eight years old when her parents were rounded up with another 200 Jews and brought to the "black forest" near Czortków where they were shot and buried in mass graves.

Sitting with her husband at her home in the Israeli city of Rehovot, the 80-year-old Holocaust survivor says she was deeply moved to learn about the exhibition and her personal contribution.

"I think the exhibition commemorating children in the Holocaust -- those who were privileged to survive it like me, and those who were not -- is a very unique idea and I was deeply moved when I heard they chose to commemorate my story. Because my story is not only mine, my story is also my mother's, my Polish family's and my story represents many children who lived to see the liberation," Goren told Reuters.

Goren's "tree" at the exhibition depicts a photo of her as a child and a replica of a chain with a religious medal with the Madonna and Jesus given to her by her Christian nanny Mrs. Czaplinska. Goren wares the original neckless.

When Goren was eight her mother smuggled her with false papers and identity to a Polish family friend, Joseph Szulc. During the Warsaw uprising Marta and her nanny Mrs. Czaplinska were sent to a concentration camp where she says Czaplinska protected her and saved her life.

She returned to Warsaw after the war but refused to reunite with her grandfather and other family members as she says she was torn between her Jewish and Christian identities. Despite her refusal she was sent to her grandfather's house but then joined a Jewish children home, with whom she immigrated to Israel.

Goren says the exhibition took her back to a grim and alienated childhood.

"When I looked [at the exhibits] I was speechless because I thought [this is only] a tree and then I realized that since I parted from my mother at the age of eight, I was mostly wandering in an alienated, strange world, with unfamiliar family, in a big city, with children who I did not know, and also did not know how to play with since I have never played before and never went to school, and [I did not know] how to escape this labyrinth, and all the lies I have surrounded myself with," she said.

The Szulc family and Mrs. Czaplinska were both honored as Righteous Among the Nations after the war.

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