An exhibition presenting wartime illustrations drawn by Ukrainian children and those drawn some 80 years ago by children who lived through the Second World War is being shown in Warsaw and a dozen other Polish cities.
The exhibition, Mum, I don’t want war, has been assembled from a selection of 7,000 works by Polish children held in the Archive of Modern Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych) in Warsaw. They were created for pedagogical research and for a competition announced in 1946 in the weekly magazine Przekrój, with the permission of the then education ministry.
These works are exhibited along with drawings by Ukrainian children made now, in 2022. The organisers of the exhibition chose from 10,000 works by young Ukrainians.
“We want to show that war always looks the same in the eyes of a child,” said Dorota Sadowska of the University of Warsaw, the exhibition’s curator, quoted by RMF FM. “Regardless of place or time, it is a great evil, and the child is always the victim”.
“The similarity between the historical and contemporary works is striking. Children draw tanks, planes dropping bombs, fires and explosions. They draw the wounded and the dead, ruined houses, and graves. They draw themselves and their families, they draw evacuation and escape. But they also draw hope and their dreams for the future,” she added.
Contemporary drawings by children from Ukraine will be combined into the world’s largest collage on the war in Ukraine, which “will remain forever on the internet using NFT technology,” the creators of the Ukrainian project, Mom, I see war, wrote on their website.
The collage of images of the drawings will be auctioned off at NFT’s international digital charity auction, with the proceeds going to a humanitarian aid fund for children affected by the war.
There is no information yet on the project’s website as to when and how the auction will take place.
We have collected more than 10,000 children's drawings about the war in Ukraine: bright, painful and very sincere. We are looking for an artist who could create a collage manifesto from these drawings, which will be put up for NFT auction. #NFT #Ukraine #NFTCommunity pic.twitter.com/N1s1FVKTEg
— 🇺🇦 Mom, I see war | NFT (@momiseewarNFT) April 5, 2022
Poland has been the primary destination for refugees since the start of the war, with more than one million, mostly women and children, estimated to currently be staying in the country.
Some 200,000 Ukrainian children joined Polish schools just a few weeks after fleeing Ukraine, but most continued their education in the Ukrainian system remotely. Now Polish education ministry says Polish schools are ready to accept up to 300,000 additional Ukrainian pupils.
Main photo credit: Archiwum Akt Nowych
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
