The Children That Weren't

The Children That Weren't

Weren’t allowed to play
Weren’t allowed to grow
Weren’t allowed to fall in love
to be a family
to dance
to dream
to live…

The story of this piece began with my granddaughter Liza. As I stood listening to her beautiful voice sing Passover songs, her grandfather Jack commented, “Moments like this make me hate Hitler more than even before. How could anyone kill sweet, innocent children like this?”  

I got into my car and began to weep.

I have continued to weep throughout the progression of this artistic and spiritual journey. I wept while sketching my visions sitting in the car that day. I wept when I found that box that looked like a train car. I wept when I found the red glass that looked like blood and fire. And I wept as I carefully created each and every child’s figure, in awe how each piece of wood somehow fit into the other.

Originally, the children were to symbolize the children that were interned at the Concentration Camp Terizin and later perished at Auschwitz. I had their poems and art. I wanted their names.

I asked Yad Vashem if they could help me find them. What I found instead was a partial list of the 1.2 million children that perished in the Holocaust.

Next came the question of how to personalize all these precious children. With the help of my dear friend Jill, who began to write. She wrote and wrote and wrote, filling the outside of the box with as many of the names as she could fit, saying each name aloud as she wrote. Several thousand of the children's names and ages at death surround the entire box. 

I have found approximately 13,000 of the 1.2 million names. The lists are in this suitcase.

I could not have made this journey without the friends who saw my passion and understood why. To Teri, who spoke the name, to Wendy, who helped me put my vision into reality, to Jill,who said Kaddish as she wrote.

To the children.

Find process photos here.