When in 1976 Moshe Safdie was invited by the Knesset to design a small museum to one and a half million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, to be erected in the Yad Vashem memorial complex, no one envisaged he would propose a highly innovative approach to public history making. What the Israeli government had in mind was a traditional documentary museum recalling the wartime plight of the children. But Safdie offered an alternative model of remembrance. His project rejected the factual focus and put feeling at the heart of the visitor experience. At first, Knesset was sceptical about the idea but the project was enthusiastically embraced by survivors, many of whom lost their children in the Shoah.1 The memorial was eventually unveiled in 1987, and to this day, it remains one of the most universal sites of memory devoted to children.
When I first visited the memorial, I was struck by its modern design and the innovative use of light, sound and image. As you enter the memorial, you are enveloped with darkness which is only diffused by several candles whose light is reflected in the mirrors that line the room. In the background, atonal music can be heard as the names of children are being read out. We can see their faces looking at us from photographs. The memorial speaks to our senses. Sight, hearing and an indeterminate sense of feeling are all heightened. The space can be unsettling and claustrophobic for its darkness. The illusory presence created by the display of the children’s faces is an uncanny prop with which to reflect on their absence. The rhythmical enunciation of their names is a powerful reminder of the crime.
There is no denying that the site rouses senses and makes one feel things. And yet, the memorial restates some of the common ideas about children in war, those who were annihilated in World War II, in general, and in the Holocaust, in particular. Here, the children are solely victims. Their lives are reduced to their deaths. We cannot hear them speak or see them in day-to-day situations, playing, resting or enjoying the loving embrace of their families. Their images are formal, as any evidence is. Their names, read out one after another, reduce them to basic personal information. And yet, wartime childhood is more than that. It is about shooting pigeons in the confines of a Jewish ghetto, longing for a pet while hiding in a gentile apartment, acting older so that you are allowed to carry a gun in an uprising, picking potatoes on a collective farm in Siberia , and falling asleep on your father’s back as you escape persecution. Being a child in World War II meant many things that go beyond the contemporary perceptions of childhood as solely tragic or innocent, passive or gullible. Public representations of children tend to evade those deeply personal stories and the embodied ways of experiencing war, particularly in case of very small children.2 After all, those stories do not lend themselves well to collective narratives of memory and nationhood. As affective as they are, they are hardly the fodder for national imagination. It is often the more compelling narratives of collective suffering, displacement and armed struggle that continue to captivate societies and fashion children into alluring commemorative objects, supplying us with new stories about war and armed conflict at both national and European levels.
Childhood
Childhood is a relatively recent cultural and social construct which Philippe Ariès associates with the modern era. In his seminal work, Centuries of Childhood (1962), he links the invention of childhood to the development of educational system in the seventeenth-century Europe. It was during that period that we saw the emergence of family as a distinct social unit which brought about a more defined divide between children and adults.3 For Ariès, the child was an intrinsic part of the public sphere, be it in school or in the kindergarten. With time, as he argues, also those spaces turned into sites of confinement that defined where and how childhood could be enacted. This, inevitably, excluded minors from the public and led to their ghettoization within those tightly regulated surroundings. It is to this process that Ariès attributes the continued marginalization of children in social and political life.4
Over decades, there have been attempts aimed at reversing this exclusion of children from the public domain. In Poland, it was Janusz Korczak who in the 1920s proposed a more inclusive politics of childhood. In his orphans ’ home in Warsaw, which was later moved to the confines of the ghetto, he established a system of self-governance consisting of Children Council, children court of law and parliament. He also set up a weekly magazine, Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), written and edited by children, which was published between 1926 and 1939 as part of the national newspaper Nasz Przegląd (Our Review). The children’s institutions were meant to acquaint Korczak’s charges with the principles of democracy, justice, civic duty, citizenship and social participation. As Sara Efron Efrat admirably argued, “for Korczak, democracy was intrinsically linked to moral education. As the children engaged in democratic decision making regarding issues of collective concern that carried real consequences, they were not only preparing for public life in a democratic context, but were also able to develop their moral imagination and critical thinking.”5 Korczak’s ideas of inclusivity are still seen as highly influential. His thought had a major impact on the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, signed in 1924, while the educator himself was one of the international representatives invited to Geneva to sign the declaration.
This preoccupation with childhood was neither exclusive to Korczak, nor to the interwar Polish society. As Catriona Kelly shows, the twentieth century brought a rapid “modernization” of childhood across Europe, signs of which were already seen in the previous century. Systematic and concerted attempts at transforming childhood were largely imposed from above. Much of this effort was focused on the ideas of protection and care, rather than empowerment and emancipation, as was largely the case with Korczak’s efforts. Governments saw their role as central in conveying those “modern” values to society with a view of eradicating “neglect and mistreatment of children within the family and society at large”.6 In addition to those state-sanctioned activities, philanthropic organizations concerned with the well-being of children emerged an masse (although they had been also in existence prior to the nineteenth century), providing food for the poor, running homes for orphans and protecting them from cruelty.7 In that sense, the stereotypical view of minors as requiring urgent help and shielding from danger was a result of historical conditions in which the debate about childhood arose.
The mass displacement and destitution of millions of children and adolescents during World War II led to an upsurge of humanitarian activity, aimed at providing child rescue and welfare. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was created in 1946 with the purpose of providing emergency food and health care, and numerous other organizations that dealt with displaced children were either established or expanded their activity.8 According to Nicholas Stargardt “No one knew how many abandoned and orphaned children there were in Europe at the end of the war. UNESCO put the figure at 13 million. There were the children of forced labourers and children brought for ‘Germanisation ’, children from concentration camps and children whose parents had been sent to concentration camps. There were those who had survived the liquidation of the ghettos and those who had fled from villages where the whole population had been locked into barns or wooden churches before they were set alight. There were also German children who had been stranded with their schools in evacuation homes in Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland or other zones of Germany at the end of the war”.9
Not surprisingly, the wartime misery of young people attracted much public attention and led to a proliferation of humanitarian laws concerning children. World War II and its aftermath left Europe with deeply affecting portrayals of children as victims, to mention the iconic photographic examples of the “Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto”, taken in 1943, or David Chim Seymour’s image for the UNICEF “of a Polish girl, Tereska, in a residence for disturbed children, drawing chaotic tangles and circles when asked to draw her ‘home’”.10 Those portrayals became pivotal in highlighting the cruelty of the perpetrators and creating a much wider narrative of suffering of Europe’s civilian populations. According to Marta Zarzycka, those practices have been employed in humanitarian work and photojournalism for decades, their primary function—“to create remorse among aggressors, dialogue among policy-makers, and empathy among global audiences”.11 After all, children were and still are “both eye-catchers and moral referents”.12
But those ossifie...