Stars without a Heaven – Children in the Holocaust

One and a half million children were murdered in the Shoah. This number is totally unfathomable. The story of the children is particularly tragic and is different from the adult narrative. Only very few children managed to hide, and even fewer survived. The children’s point of view, in contrast to that of the adults, focuses on their immediate surroundings and on how their families and, in fact, their entire worlds were shattered. The exhibition at Yad Vashem, Children in the Holocaust – Stars without a Heaven, shed lights on various important aspects of the lives and experiences of children during the Shoah, and during the preceding period.

Using the concept of “a forest of stories,” a variety of stories are represented in the exhibition from the personal, rather than the historical point of view. The stories come together to show diverse voices, giving a dynamic feeling of vitality on the one hand, while revealing the terrible rupture they suffered on the other. Each story describes the world of a particular child or a group of children through eight different lenses: play, study, friendship, birthdays, home, identity, family, and work. Each tree tells a central story and is accompanied by other stories of the same category.

Children in the Holocaust – Stars without a Heaven opened in April 2015 in the Exhibitions Pavilion on the Yad Vashem Campus.

TO LEARN MORE: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/museum/exhibitions_pavilion.asp