The exhibition will include the story of seven rehabilitation homes • Yona Kubo, coordinator of online exhibitions at Yad Vashem: "For many of these children, these are the only pictures of girls"
"Lolek" - 8-year-old Israel Meir Lau aboard a ship in Marseille in the arms of Simon Mole
Photography:
From the Yad Vashem Archive
A new online exhibition called "Homes for Holocaust Survivors' Children" was launched on the Yad Vashem website last Friday, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.
The online exhibition focuses on the story of seven orphanages across Europe, established at the end of the war and working to rebuild the lives of children left alone and return them to their people and religion after the atrocities to which they were exposed.
Most of the caregivers, counselors and teachers in the homes were themselves Holocaust survivors, which made up for their lack of experience in education, as they could identify with those survivors and know how to rehabilitate them in the right way.
The children were treated in the same homes from the moment they arrived until a safe place was found for them, and most of them even eventually immigrated to Eretz Israel.
Yona Kubo, coordinator of online exhibitions at Yad Vashem: "In the dozens of photographs of children in children's homes, children are seen smiling, eating, playing, studying, traveling and dancing.
For many of them these are the only childhood pictures.
The gap between the joy of life seen in us from the photographs and the horrors they experienced during the Holocaust is reflected in the stories of their survival presented in the exhibition - hard life stories, loss and mental scars. "
Rachel Mintz, a native of Lodz, described the survivors of the Bakui orphanage, which she ran, whose story is presented alongside stories of other orphanages, in the online exhibition:
They brought with them a hostile distrust of human beings.
No matter who, when someone tried to stroke their cheeks, they would jump and flinch. '