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Spertus in the News
New Spertus exhibition explores plight of children hidden during the Holocaust
By Wendy Margolin
JUF News
March 2005
© 2005 all rights reserved
Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitian Chicago
In 1942, 11-year-old Dawid Tennenbaum went into hiding with his mother, settling in the Lvov region as Christians. Dawid was disguised as a girl and as mentally disabled, which exempted him from attending school and averted his being exposed.
Before World War II approximately 1.6 million Jewish children lived in the countries eventually occupied by Germany and its allies. By the war’s end, more than 1 million of those children perished. It is the lives of children both those who died and those who somehow managed to survive that are depicted in the exhibition Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust on display at Spertus Museum from March 20-July 31.
The special exhibition, on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., includes over 100 artifacts representing hidden children. Life in Shadows will be the first time that one of the USHMM’s exhibitions has traveled with artifacts, according to Susan Goldstein Snyder, associate curator at the USHMM. The exhibition opened in Washington in August 2003 and remained there for one year.
The Chicago exhibition will also include a local component with artifacts gathered from Chicagoans who were hidden children, says Olga Weiss, Spertus Museum curator emeritus.
Life in Shadows contains three components: an introduction that fleshes out the uniqueness of hidden children by explaining the life of a typical child during the war; a middle section that illustrates children’s lives in hiding; and a conclusion that describes post-wartime, a period that was sometimes more traumatic than the war.
Children in hiding faced extraordinarily difficult circumstances during and after the war, says exhibition curator Steve Luckert. Fear, isolation and frequent relocations were all part of daily life. Allied victory in 1945 brought no end to the pain felt by many hidden children who had lost their entire families. Some children were too young to have ever known their real parents and only learned about their true identities later in life. Others never came out of hiding.
The artifacts presented in the exhibition are as varied as the stories of the over 100 children who owned them. Visitors will encounter the sweater of a girl who lived in underground sewers for 19 months, a photograph of a boy dressed as a mentally retarded girl so that he didn’t have to attend school, and documents of two sisters one of them now from Chicago who hid in the countryside.
Artifacts donated by Chicagoans include a box for food storage that one father made for his child, handmade doll clothing, games, and notebooks filled with drawings. Some 20 individuals lent artifacts for the local component, which Weiss put together from members of the organization Hidden Children/Chicago, a group that she co-founded. Weiss, who was also a hidden child, contributed a set of dominoes to the Washington component of the exhibition.
The stories of hidden children during the Holocaust were dismissed for many years after the war because of an assumption that the suffering of concentration-camp survivors was so much greater. Chicagoan Aaron Elster who will speak at the exhibition’s opening, says child survivors were shushed by adult survivors who said, What do you remember? What do you know? Your suffering was minimal; we suffered. But over the years, Elster has learned that "pain is pain."
Elster says the stories of hidden children became better known in recent years, making Life in Shadows especially timely. As survivors started disappearing, we as hidden children started speaking up. Hidden children also became more likely to share their stories after finding support from peers in groups like Hidden Children/Chicago and the Holocaust Association of Children Survivors (both groups provided support for the exhibition). We were able to open up to one another where we never before were able to talk about it, says Elster, referring to the Hidden Children/Chicago group. We said things in that group that we never even said to our own families.
Many hidden children, including Elster, have committed their lives to educating people about the Holocaust. I speak because I feel that our voices are being extinguished with time. Holocaust survivors are disappearing at a very fast rate, and pretty soon there won’t be any left. And the deniers who are saying that it never happened and the people who minimize it are out there in full force, says Elster.
Life in the Shadows is not recommended for children under age 11. The exhibition opening is Sunday, March 20 at 2 p.m. Both Olga Weiss and Aaron Elster will share compelling personal accounts of their own experiences. Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies is a partner in serving our community, supported by the JUF/Jewish Federation. The museum is located at 618 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago. For information call (312) 322-1747, email museum@spertus.edu, or visit www.spertus.edu.
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