Children During the Holocaust

Martin Will was four years old when his family was sent to the Theresienstadt camp. During his time there, he drew a picture of a jeep which carried a delegation from the Red Cross visiting the camp – a delegation that the Nazis managed to deceive into believing they were treating Jews humanely.

Will survived the Holocaust, along with the naive painting he made as a small child in a world gone mad. Today, his drawing is part of a new exhibition at Yad Vashem: "Stars Without a Sky – Children During the Holocaust."

One and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. The few thousand who survived the death camps and other horrors often could not preserve any childhood possessions. Among the few stories in the exhibition, there are period artifacts like Martin's drawing. In other instances, all that remains are memories.

The childhood stories are presented across 33 pages representing a forest, each focusing on themes such as play, learning, and rites of passage. The display includes original items alongside artworks, testimonies, and video clips. A glass cabinet holds a collection of dolls, each with its own story. One of the dolls is named Lizzy – a doll with a cracked head and blue hair ribbons that belonged to Johanna Rosenberg. Johanna took the doll with her when she left Germany at the age of 5 on the *Kindertransport*, the rescue trains that transported Jewish children to England before the war broke out. Her parents were sent to death camps and perished, but Johanna survived along with her doll.

Some dolls belonged to children who are no longer with us. For example, the doll in the blue dress belonged to 5-year-old Inge Liebe from Dresden, Germany, who was sent with her mother to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they both perished.

"The Holocaust cut short the childhoods of many children, and in some cases, they helped support their families and encouraged their parents in the desperate struggle for survival," says curator Yehudit Inbar. "Nevertheless, they remained children. Whenever possible, they played, laughed, created, and expressed their fears and hopes. The drawings, diaries, songs, music, letters, and toys in the exhibition offer a moving and profound insight into childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust."