Yom Hashoah: Remembering the Holocaust Through Children’s Art

Following my modest contribution to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I received, in addition to a thank you letter, a collection of four greeting cards. The colorful copies of the original pictures and drawings painted by teenage Jewish artists in Poland captured my attention. They also touched my heart and, with a bit of research, I learned that they were created during their drastically shortened lives in the ghetto.

Collected by Irena Peritz, herself a Holocaust survivor and a childhood friend of the artists, the drawings depict the young girls’ zest for life with their childhood dreams and fantasies, just like those of every normal teenager we know.

But this was not a normal era for these teenagers, whose creative life as talented artists was exterminated forever but, fortunately for us, not perished from the pages of Peritz’s book called Pamientnik (Memoir in Polish). Irena Peritz, who was 14 in 1942, recalled her life in a ghetto in Poland as ‘’where life was a daily struggle’’ and where she worked cleaning toilets at a police station.

Irena and her mother were moved to the home of friends, a Gentile family. “They knew the consequences of hiding Jews, but with no questions asked, they took us in,” she explained. They hid from a Nazi search under hay and were very close to being found. “We remained hidden for three days before we returned to the ghetto to be reunited with my father and sister. I lived through two more years of horror before I would be free again. Miraculously, through it all, we survived.”

Also included in the memoir book are Irena’s handwritten wartime diaries, which include her life in the Borysław ghetto, the experience of going into hiding, life in hiding, and the family’s liberation. Peritz has translated some of the diary entries into a book, with copies of photographs, entitled ‘’Irena’s Diary: My Wartime Memories.’’

The collection includes a number of handwritten letters sent to Irena Peritz from Janka and Niuta Teicher, her close friends, smuggled from their labor camp in Dachówczarnia to Irena in the Borysław ghetto, in 1943. At one time, these close friends were inseparable and shared secrets and laughter, played in the park, celebrated birthdays, and painted happy pictures.

But the tragedy of it all is that they and the hundred of thousands of other young children were never allowed to be young again.

On this Yom Hashoah, as we remember our loved ones who lost their innocent lives in the horrors of the Holocaust, we must share their stories or their childhood drawings with our young generation. If the world forgets, it may happen again.

Lina Broydo immigrated from Russia, then the Soviet Union, to Israel where she was educated and got married. After working at the University in Birmingham, England she and her husband immigrated to the United States. She lives in Los Altos Hills, CA and writes about travel, art, style, entertainment, and sports. She hardly cooks or bakes, not the best of ‘’balabostas’’ her beloved beautiful Mom, Dina, was hoping for. Therefore, she makes reservations and enjoys dining out.

By Lina Broydo