back...“We were just children”. Gehenna of Polish children during World War II and after  – the latest exhibition at the Museum of Polish Children – Victims of Totalitarianism

"In September 1943, I was arrested. I was still a minor at the time, and so I was sent to a camp for minors in Lodz, along with 50 other children from Mosina. For me, it was a harrowing experience, also due to the fact that my parents and sisters had been arrested the day before.  I remember that the Germans came for me at 9 a.m., gathered us in one of the halls in Mosina, then took us by truck to Poznan, and then to Lodz," said Kazimierz Cieslewicz, a former prisoner of the camp on Przemyslowa Street. This is one of the many quotes that can be found on the boards of the Museum's latest exhibition. The opening of the exhibition was held on August 30 this year in the building of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland.

The opening of the exhibition preceded the celebration of a new national holiday, the National Day of Polish Children of War, which will be celebrated on September 10, i.e. the anniversary of the mass arrests of children of members of the Polish underground resistance movement in the Wielkopolska town of Mosina carried out by the occupying German authorities in 1943.

“The arrests of children from Mosina, to whom part of the exhibition is dedicated, are a symbol of the martyrdom of the most vulnerable victims of the occupation of the lands of the Second Republic of Poland by two totalitarian empires: the German Third Reich and the Soviet Union. The aim of the exhibition is to familiarize its viewers with the dramatic fate of children who faced deportation, slave labour, detention, imprisonment in concentration camps or gulags, and death,” says Dr. Ireneusz Piotr Maj, director of the Museum.

Subsequent boards of the exhibition are devoted to, among other things, the fate of the young prisoners of the Przemyslowa camp, children displaced from their home villages and towns, abducted for Germanisation, child labourers sent to forced labour in Germany, the youngest participants in the Warsaw Uprising, children deported deep into the USSR, and the descendants of the Doomed Soldiers.

On the title board of the exhibition, there is a QR code redirecting to a subpage where all the exhibition boards are available with descriptions.

The exhibition was subsidized by PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna S.A., which is a patron of the Museum of Polish Children – Victims of Totalitarianism.a