A brand new exhibition is bringing collectively Ukrainian youngsters’s drawings depicting the continuing Russian invasion and Polish youngsters’s drawings produced within the aftermath of the Second World Conflict.
The present “Mum, I Do not Need Conflict”—on show in 16 cities throughout Poland, together with Warsaw and the border city of Przemyśl, a significant port of arrival for Ukrainian refugees—emphasises the shared experiences of occupation, repression and resistance, in addition to an everlasting religion in victory. The drawings represent a transferring testimony of battle, highlighting its notably brutal impression upon society’s youngest members.
A show of the youngsters’s drawings outdoors the Staszic Palace in Warsaw Courtesy of the “Mother, I See Conflict” mission
The present is a joint initiative between Poland’s Nationwide Archives and the Ukrainian digital mission “Mother, I See Conflict”. Poland’s Nationwide Archives maintain greater than 7,000 youngsters’s drawings from 1946, produced as a part of a post-war initiative to allow younger Poles to course of their trauma from the Nazi occupation. Equally, the “Mother, I See Conflict” mission has collected greater than 13,500 youngsters’s drawings because the starting of Russia’s invasion in February. Its founders intend to provide a everlasting digital collage of Ukrainian youngsters’s artworks—concurrently spreading consciousness of Ukraine’s plight and elevating funds for humanitarian support. As soon as accomplished, the collage can be auctioned as an NFT, with all proceeds going in the direction of Ukrainian youngsters’s charities.
Polish youngsters’s post-war drawings from 1946 Courtesy of Poland’s Nationwide Archives
Though produced practically a century aside, the similarity between the modern and historic youngsters’s drawings is “surprising”, in line with Paweł Pietrzyk, the director of Poland’s Nationwide Archives. “Youngsters draw tanks, planes, fires and explosions. They draw the wounded and the useless, ruined homes and graves. They draw themselves and their households. They draw evacuation and escape. However in addition they draw photos of hope and of their desires for the long run.”
Drawing by Arina, 10, from Sumy, Ukraine Courtesy of the “Mother, I See Conflict” mission
Alongside drawings, the exhibition options private testimony from Polish and Ukrainian youngsters concerning their wartime experiences. 9-year-old Zlata from Myronivka, southeast of Kyiv, writes: “I wish to see the solar, not basement partitions”. Valeriia, 13, from Lviv, writes: “I might by no means have thought that the enjoyment of childhood could be overshadowed by the battle.” Anhelina, 15, from Lutsk in western Ukraine, writes: “They needed to make us panic, however we have now united and we’re not afraid.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a citation from the Polish, Jewish educator and kids’s advocate Janusz Korczak, who was murdered at Treblinka extermination camp in 1942: “A baby isn’t a soldier. He doesn’t defend his homeland, although he suffers with it.”
