WUNRN
“A glass case contains a collection of dolls, each with a story. Liselotte, in a floral dress and blue shoes with ribbons, her head now cracked, belonged to Johanna Rosenberg, who took the doll with her when she left Germany at the age of 5 on a Kindertransport, a rescue that took her to England in 1939. Her parents were deported and killed. Another doll in a blue dress belonged to Inge Liebe, 5, from Dresden, Germany. She was deported with her mother to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where both died.”
EXHIBIT
SHOWCASES WORLD OF CHILDREN DURING HOLOCAUST
The stories
of children who went through the Holocaust are the focus of a new exhibition at
Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum which opened ahead of Israel's...
LOOKING BACK AT THE HOLOCAUST, THROUGH A CHILD’S EYES -
EXHIBIT
By ISABEL KERSHNER - APRIL 14, 2015
JERUSALEM — Jakov Goldstein survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding
alone for two years in a narrow attic, sustained by the books delivered each
day by the eldest daughter of the Polish family that shielded him. Eliyahu Rozdzial
turned 13, hidden alone in the forest and farms around his hometown,
Dzialoszyce, Poland, after his family had been killed. He observed his bar
mitzvah by digging an imaginary synagogue from the earth and filling it with
upright twigs to serve as a silent congregation.
And 4-year-old Martin Weyl survived life in the Terezin ghetto and camp,
also known as Theresienstadt, just north of Prague. Forced there with his
family, he drew a picture of a jeep that brought a Red Cross delegation to
visit the ghetto, which had been showcased by Adolf Hitler to fool the world
into believing that Jews were being treated humanely.
These and other children — some who lived, many who died — are being
featured in a new exhibition, “Children in the Holocaust: Stars Without a
Heaven,” which opened this week at Yad Vashem, the official Holocaust memorial
in Jerusalem, for Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday.
About 1.5 million children were killed during the Holocaust. The few
thousand who survived the concentration camps and other horrors generally did
not manage to keep any of their belongings. Some of the stories are illustrated
by items from Yad Vashem’s collections of artifacts, art and archives, like the
simple, precise drawing of the jeep ferrying the Red Cross. In other cases,
only the memories remain.
“Children are the most vulnerable group in any society,” said Avner Shalev,
the chairman of Yad Vashem. “They are innocent and symbolize in any given
society the future, the hope.”
Nazi ideology did not differentiate between adults and children, and the
plan was to wipe out the Jewish people in its entirety, meaning, according to
Mr. Shalev, that “the children were doomed to be destroyed.”
As Israel observes Remembrance Day it is also introducing a program
developed by Yad Vashem and the Education Ministry to help teachers approach
the subject of the Holocaust with children as early as kindergarten age, and
will expand Holocaust studies to schools in the Arab sector for the first time.
In the past, kindergarten teachers were largely left to decide on their own
what to say when sirens wailed and much of the country came to a standstill for
two minutes of silence in memory of the victims. The new, voluntary program is
supposed to offer age-appropriate guidance to help children deal with the
signals that they inevitably pick up all around them. They can be told, for
example, that the sirens are to remember something bad that happened a long
time ago and far away.
Children who lived through the Holocaust had a much weaker grasp of what
was happening around them than the adults, but unfolding catastrophe often led
them to assume responsibilities beyond their years.
However dire the situation, they continued to express their creativity and
humanity, which is reflected in the exhibit.
“They remain children and do what children do,” said Yehudit Inbar, the
chief curator of the Yad Vashem exhibition. They play, they imagine.
“Imagination,” she added, “becomes an amazing tool of survival.”
Their childhoods are represented in the exhibition by a hall of 33 columns
symbolizing a forest, each displaying stories focused on themes like play,
learning and rites of passage. The displays feature original artifacts, newer
artworks, individual testimonies and digital screens.
A glass case contains a collection of dolls, each with a story. Liselotte,
in a floral dress and blue shoes with ribbons, her head now cracked, belonged
to Johanna Rosenberg, who took the doll with her when she left Germany at the
age of 5 on a Kindertransport, a rescue that took her to England in 1939. Her
parents were deported and killed. Another doll in a blue dress belonged to Inge
Liebe, 5, from Dresden, Germany. She was deported with her mother to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, where both died.
Mr. Weyl, who drew the Red Cross jeep, recalled playing at the garbage dump
in Theresienstadt with his sister, Rachel, who was about 8. He said that they
would look for pieces of glass and use them to focus the sun’s rays to start a
fire, and that they would also play with the wagons that transported the dead.
When the Red Cross came to visit the ghetto, the Weyl children, who were
from Rotterdam, were assigned a role by the SS.
“We had to ask the commander, ‘Did you bring us chocolate today?’ as if he
brought us chocolate every day,” Mr. Weyl recalled, “and he would give us
chocolate that we never got.”
He remembers being afraid when the Soviets liberated Theresienstadt in
1945: “We weren’t sure if it was real or a trick.”
Mr. Weyl was repatriated to the Netherlands, immigrated to Israel in 1959
and went on to become a curator and director of the Israel Museum. He found the
drawing of the Red Cross jeep years later among some family papers, and donated
it to Yad Vashem.
Jakov Goldstein, who crawled out of the attic after the family caring for
him had fled, made his way to Palestine
in 1947 and went on to become a professor in the department of Land of Israel
studies at Haifa University. His memoir, “Autumn Memories,” was published in
2007.
Eliyahu Rozdzial, who also arrived in Palestine
in 1947, took a Hebrew surname, Raziel, and built a new life on a kibbutz in
Israel. His solitary bar mitzvah has now been memorialized in a minute-long, animated
video, allowing many to share in the virtual celebration of one
boy’s survival.