Exhibition: Children’s Drawing from Terezín

Opening times: Monday - Friday, 12:00pm-2:00pm and 4:00pm-6:00pm (from Tuesday 2 June)

Concert in the dormitory, anonymous artist, Terezín, 1943-44. By permission of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Some 15,000 children were among the 150,000 Jews sent to the Terezín ghetto/concentration camp located 40 miles from Prague. All but 132 of them perished, many of them ending up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. To bring some semblance of light amidst the darkness of the ghetto, Viennese artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis began giving art classes upon her arrival in Terezín in 1942. Although she also perished in Auschwitz, Friedl had first hidden more than 4,000 children’s drawings in two suitcases that were discovered in Terezín after the war.

Now displayed by the Jewish Museum, Prague, in its Pinkas Synagogue exhibition, for many of the children of Terezín these pictures are all that remains as a commemoration of their short lives. By turns playful, tragic, colourful and sombre, the drawings are a poignant reminder of the youthful potential that was cruelly cut short in the Holocaust. Rarely seen outside Prague, these authorised prints are supplied courtesy of Amelia Freedman CBE artistic director and founder of the Nash Ensemble.

Admission free

Exhibition opening
The exhibition will be formally opened at a reception following the concert Gideon Klein: Portrait of a Composer, on Wednesday 1 June by Arek Hersh, a Holocaust survivor who was liberated from Terezín. The concert will be preceded by a conversation with another Terezín survivor, Zdenka Fantlova, who knew the composer Gideon Klein personally. Join us at the concert to see the opening of the exhibition!