One of the exhibits on the third floor of the Museum of Jewish Heritage tells the history of the children who survived the 2nd World War and the Holocaust. While not entirely a singular piece, the exhibit is a cohesive piece that I believe warrants treatment as a “singular” work, especially since it works off of repetition of a particular format. The exhibit is a room full of vertical white banners. Each banner has a photo located in the center of the image, and below it there are about two paragraphs of text about the child and where they are now. The photos are black and white, but they are not without color. The ambient light of the room gives them all a soft warm tone. The children in the photo look happy (aside from some of the extremely young infants who are occasionally crying) and they hold a wood plank with their name messily written on it. The name on the plank functions as a signifier, indicating that it is what the child in the image is called. It humanizes the child by turning them from simply a generic “child” to someone with a name, a history, and a future. The paragraph below the photograph gives detail on their lives after the photo was taken and what their lives are like currently, if that information is available. If a child’s information is not available, the exhibit also functions as an attempt to find their story. At first glance the photos look as if they’re referencing a mug shot or something that relates to a criminal and cold and documentative process. However, after looking more closely at the photos they have a much friendlier atmosphere. They are taken with a smiling and willing participant and the sign appears to have been written by a child. As the only child present, it would be safe to assume that the child in the photo is the child who wrote the name. This is an important aspect of the work. This is what allows the piece to have a warmth, a hope even. We can see the hope that appeared before their “happy ending” and with those whose stories have not been found, we are left wishing for that answer. The exhibit is innovative in that the curators also expanded it to social media by creating an Instagram account that allows people to share and spread the word about this exhibit in hopes of finishing the stories without an end.
The piece also has quite a clear punctum. The exhibit is meant to emotionally connect you to these children who have survived the war and its atrocities and have the viewer think more closely about what it means for these children to go through these experiences. They turn the generic front page image of the suffering child going through a plight beyond our understanding, and perhaps interest, into a child that we can now know. No longer a referent of an idea we don’t care about, it is a child. A person with a past, present, and future. It makes it very easy for the viewer to connect these children to other refugees and understand their plight in a less abstract manner and one much more compassionate manner.
