By: Michelle Park
This mapping project focuses on the children the SS imprisoned in Auschwitz. What did it mean for children to have their childhood heinously negated and precluded by the inhumanity of the SS and Auschwitz? How did children perceive of a place so deeply and sorely incongruent with their emotional worlds? A place, that is, where children were not recognized as children?
This project conceptualizes childhood as being inextricably linked to personhood. As such, it proceeds from the premise that to deny children a childhood is to deny them of their fundamental humanity. Therefore, the study of children in Auschwitz is not only important because the children matter, but also because it matters that the children were children.
The format of the project likewise follows from this premise. That is, to center the humanity of children, is, in crucial part, to center the voices and testimonies of child survivors. Throughout the project, excerpts from the testimonies of survivors are included whenever and wherever possible. In this way, mapping serves to highlight the contrast and tension between the person, which is the child, and the place, which is the camp complex. Moreover, this, in turn, ties into the study of Auschwitz as a place of memory. The perspectives of children introduce a formidable dimension of intricacy and complexity to discourses of historical signification, commemoration, memorialization, and museum culture. Learning about the presence of children offers a different and critical prism through which to contemplate the relationship between memory and place in Holocaust studies.
Relatedly, the project meta-analytically argues that the perceptiveness of children, especially as compared to adults, is a matter of kind and not degree. That is to say, it regarded the perspectives, observations, and lived experiences of children on the basis that it was not about how much they could discern of the camp, rather how they discerned the camp. Thus, children, in this context, did have a cognizance of the place, but it differed from that of adults (i.e., children relate to their environment in a certain way). Consequently, the project sought to ensure that the inner worlds of children were brought to the fore, whenever and wherever possible, in an effort to emphasize that the specificities distinguishing children’s perspectives and relationality to place are imperative to the study of the camp. However, the project does not endeavour to propound or proclaim that any straightforward or adequate answers can be derived from this approach or others. Instead, it aims to reaffirm the humanistic and scholarly significance of children and their interiorities.
On a final note, the project was mindful to utilize language that was unequivocal about the perpetrators in Auschwitz and of the Holocaust. This, among other things, entailed using the active voice to describe atrocities the SS committed, using humanizing language to describe children, and using adverbs and adjectives to underscore the severity of the camp. Therefore, the linguistic choices and phraseological stylings of this work are of a particular kind. These may be helpful points to keep in mind while engaging with the project.
As this is an interactive work, you may wish to go through the slides manually using the arrows on the bottom left corner; alternatively, you may also wish to use the buttons located on the slides themselves for greater ease of navigation (this latter option is strongly recommended for the best viewing experience):