A teddy bear that will soon be 90 years old. A child’s suitcase. A comforter.
The show explores a range of young voices, through drawings, quotes, poems, oral histories, artefacts, and immersive exhibits. When putting the exhibition together, a stark difference struck him, he adds. Adults remember conflict in terms of what changed: bread lines, blackout curtains, soldiers, tanks. Children tend to focus on the things that stayed the same: people, places and objects that offered a sense of familiarity and safety. A lamb comforter belonging to a girl named Mariia from Ukraine, for instance, didn’t even start out as hers. The mother and six-year-old fled into Poland, arrived at a refugee reception centre, and Mariia was invited to pick a toy from a box of donations.
At Childhood in War, an exhibition underway at the Imperial War Museums (IWM), London, everyday objects tell stories from across more than a century, and over 20 regions, from World War 1 (1914-18), the Falklands and Afghanistan to Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, present-day Ukraine and, minimally, Israel and Gaza. With more than 450 million children, one in six globally, living in areas affected by conflict, according to Unicef (the United Nations Children’s Fund), the exhibition aims to highlight how such conflict is seen and experienced, by those who don’t yet understand the forces at play. As her mother frantically packed a bag for her, when Russia invaded in 2022, only essentials made the cut.
Children are often spoken about in war, but less-often heard themselves, says curator Craig Murray.
They too had lost everything. A stuffed teddy, on loan from its owner, has an even longer history. It is the only surviving keepsake from his childhood. Teddy was with him when his father was taken to a Nazi labour camp, and his mother to a concentration camp. When he lived in hiding in a non-Jewish neighbour’s cupboard, and then in a ghetto in Budapest. He and his mother moved to Austria, then Britain, aboard a Red Cross train again, and the teddy made the journey with them. He now tells his grandchildren its story.
John Hajdu’s parents bought it for him when he was three, in 1940. Hajdu, now 89, keeps it on his desk at home. When the ghetto was liberated in 1945, Hajdu was reunited with his parents.
She arrived in England in 1939, aged 11, as part of the Kindertransport scheme that brought Jewish children from Nazi-controlled Europe to safety in Britain. Kester, then in her 70s, donated it to IWM in 2003. She died in England aged 92. Take the jumper belonging to Carl Lopes, who was a child when his family was among the British ones taken to an internment camp in Shanghai by Japanese forces during World War 2. When the camp was liberated in 1945, fellow internee Jimmy Lovelock decided to use it as a canvas and drew what looks like a yawning fox, on it. Similarly, in a recreation of a Cold War-era living room and kitchen, visitors can pick up the handpiece of a rotary-dial telephone and listen to oral histories of conflicts that stretch from 1914 to 2011. Among the contemporary artefacts, a poem by a 15-year-old girl describes the panic and fear when the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021. A poem by 17-year-old Nahid from Afghanistan is titled If We Had PEACE; it was also written in 2021.
It is on loan and will be returned to her after the exhibition. Like many of the objects and stories, it was sourced through child rights organisations such as Unicef, Right to Learn Afghanistan and War Child. Elsewhere on display is a small suitcase that once belonged to a girl named Stephanie Kester from Austria. The suitcase was a gift from Kester’s grandparents. She had used it to store her toys. When she arrived in England, it carried documents and family photographs. TAKE A STEP BACK There’s a critical tendency among adults to view children as resilient, and they are resilient. some contain memories of friendship and even jubilation While most of the objects on display tell stories of displacement and fear. Other children from the camp then added their drawings and signatures too. In addition to the artefacts, Murray and his team have created immersive environments aimed at people of all ages. Visitors can sit on child-sized furniture in a recreation of a child’s bedroom, for instance, and leaf through books, view drawings and other mementos. The final section, Freedom of Thought, includes drawings by children from Sudan, depicting attacks on their homes.
She chose the lamb comforter, and hung on to it, “when everything familiar had been disrupted,” Murray says. Her parents would later join her in the UK, but until then, this small case “carried memories of them, and of the life she left behind,” Murray says. But that doesn’t take away from the fact of the damage that war will do and the damage they will carry through life,” Murray says. “The jumper became a memento of their time there, and of the bonds they had formed,” Murray says. “I witnessed how that day darkened not only Kabul’s sky, but also the dreams and hopes of so many,” she writes. “Many of the drawings contain detailed depictions of militia, armies, and aircraft, including uniforms, colours and shapes, emphasising how deeply ingrained these memories are,” says curator Fran Singleton. “The fact that these drawings were used as evidence of war crimes at the International Criminal Court confirms their accuracy, and the importance of taking children’s experiences seriously.” (Childhood in War is on view at Imperial War Museums, London, until February)
