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Art In the Shadow of Death


Shari Ben-Natan

While working for the past twelve years with severely abused children, I have many times thought about the Holocaust children. What were they thinking? How did they perceive their surroundings? Did they have the time or the opportunity to express their feelings?

We have found that using drawing and the arts is a good way for a therapist to come to understand how a child perceives himself, his place in this world, and his surroundings. This of course would be true of the children from the Holocaust but were there drawings from this time out of hell? Did someone save the children's drawings? This question began to intrigue me more and more and I decided to look more closely into whatever was saved from that era.

Soon after launching my trek into the drawings of these children, I found that most of the drawings that were saved, came out of Terezin. I will relate the reasons for this later, but here I would like to thank profusely two very special women, Alisah Shiller and Alisa Shek. Both of them were teenagers in Terezin and today they are the curators of the "Beit Terezin" archives and Museum in Kibbutz Givat Haim. Spending a day there was very special and I felt their frantic need of getting all of the men, women, and children that were in Terezin computerized. These two women seemed to know personally everyone, if they are still alive, where they are living and what they are doing.

Alisa Shek was the expert on the art section and she immediately brought out albums of children's artwork. Later on I found out that her drawings were among these drawings and I bothered her endlessly with questions that seemed strange to her, but she graciously answered. They also opened up one of the glass exhibits in the Museum containing small books that two young girls had drawn and sewn. One of them was particularly poignant and I felt very honored to be able to see and touch this remembrance from a very young girl that was sent soon after to her death in Auschwitz. It portrayed on the first page the gates of Terezin. On the second, a train. I immediately thought of the transports out of Terezin, but Alisah Shiller said she thought that it portrayed the coming to Terezin. Actually, this made more sense because the next drawing showed the three tier bunk beds that the children slept in.

I also visited the Museum and Library of "Lochme Hagetaot", but the experience at Beit Terezin left me thinking and dreaming of these children for many nights after.

In this paper I will try to address the question of how the Children of the Holocaust used drawing to cope with what they saw and felt. I will also fantasize about what went on in some of these children's minds while depicting specific scenes. How they evoked, through these drawings, their own fantasies, dreams, nightmares and fears. And, of course, I will address the different defense mechanisms that helped them through the days and nights in hell.