Farbenlicht

February 22, 2022 In Children’s art By Kristina

Children’s drawings from Terezín

🌿Some works of the collection of children’s drawings from Terezín✡️

This is the largest collection of children’s drawings from the period of the Shoah in the world. It contains a total of 4387 drawings by Jewish children who passed through the Terezin Ghetto during the Second World War.

All the drawings were made over a short two-year period (1943-44) as part of the drawing classes taught by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944), one of the most outstanding female artists from the interwar avant-garde.

In the ghetto, she lived in the girls’ home and taught art classes to hundreds of young boys and girls. She designed sets and costumes for children’s performances, and made an exhibition of children’s drawings in a basement of the girls home. Her warmth and innovative teaching methods she learned at the Bauhaus truly helped these children in a time of chaos and tragedy.
Her goal was to restore “the shaken inner world of the children.” She saw the purpose of children’s art as the “greatest possible freedom for the child”, and she wanted to use art as therapy for children.

In autumn of 1944 she and the majority of her students were deported East, and with her nearly all of them perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The four and a half thousand children’s drawings from Terezín that Friedl Dicker-Brandeis collected after the classes and kept in two suitcases, which she hid in one of the ghetto’s children’s dormitories before her transport to Auschwitz, has been part of the Jewish Museum in Prague’s collection since the end of the war. The drawings have been exhibited all over the world since 1945, and a number of books have been published on them.