• 1 Ewa Domańska, “Humanistyka nie-antropocentryczna a studia nad rzeczami,” Kultura Współczesna 3 (200 (...)
• 2 George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows (Amherst: University of M (...)
• 3 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New (...)

1In the non-anthropocentric humanities, objects are considered to “co-fashion human identities.”1 This view is of particular relevance and produces special meanings in the study of things connected to the Holocaust as these things not only talk but also give testimony and transmit memory, because they boast life stories of their own which are interwoven with the dramatic life stories of people. Things accompanied people in hiding, on their way to ghettoes, in transports to concentration camps and, sometimes, in their last moments, when facing death.2 Stolen, changing hands and finally preserved at museums, things are not simply discrete objects that represent their respective owners but, especially when amassed in heaps of, for example, suitcases or shoes, they also metonymically represent the Holocaust as organized, industrial-scale genocide. Objects associated with childhood, in particular toys, take a unique place among such things, because they commemorate one and a half million Jewish children who were killed in the Holocaust and the traumatic and lost childhood of the handful who survived. In the context of memory studies, Marianne Hirsch depicts “testimonial objects”3 as vehicles for the memory of the Holocaust, and Bożena Shallcross highlights the intimate interrelatedness of people and things:

• 5 Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, 5.
• 6 Ibid., 79.
• 7 Krzysztof Rybak, “Rzeczy do zabawy. Zabawki w cieniu Zagłady w twórczości Uriego Orleva,” in O czym (...)
• 8 Pauline Dewan, “More Than Child’s Play: The Scaffolding Role of Toys, Games, and Play in Children’s (...)
• 9 Daniel Feldman, “Children’s Play in the Shadow of War,” American Journal of Play 11 (2019): 303, ac (...)

3Play and the Holocaust are radically discordant and clashing concepts, as elucidated by George Eisen: “children’s play and the Holocaust confront the untrained observer with a perplexing contradiction. […] Mass murder signifies the ultimate evil while play, at least in popular imagination, speaks of a measure of innocence and happiness.”5 In his study of children’s play during the Holocaust, Eisen relates what often come across as shocking instances of play, such as children tickling dead bodies when messing around in the ghetto.6 Eisen pictures various kinds of play invented by children in ghettoes, camps, hiding places and the like settings, where traditionally conceived toys were few and far between. This deprivation prompted children to use a range of objects as toys. When discussing play in Uri Orlev’s work, Krzysztof Rybak dubs such toys “things to play with” and describes them as “phantom-like objects whose semantic field does not overlap with the denotation of the word ‘toy’.”7 Pauline Dewan foregrounds the essential role of play as children’s primary language for externalizing emotions and the subconscious,8 and Daniel Feldman investigates wartime play to conclude that play “communicates latent childhood feelings of anxiety, defiance, or complex engagement with difficult circumstances forged by war.”9 In discussing the emotional and psychological relationship of the child and the toy during the Holocaust, Eisen explicates:

• 11 “Stars Without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust,” Ready2print exhibition of Yad Vashem. The Worl (...)

4Given this, toys, which tended to be the only objects that reminded children of family and home, were emotionally becoming children’s whole world. The fundamental function that toys performed in the lives of these children, forced, as they were, to leave their homes, part with their loved ones, go into hiding, flee and try to survive in ghettoes and concentration camps, has also been highlighted in exhibitions, such as Yad Vashem’s No Child’s Play: Children in the Holocaust: Creativity and Play (which proved so popular that it was on from 1996 to 2015) and the Stars Without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust Ready2print exhibition.11 All these toys has have their own history, which is interlaced with the history of human beings, and some narratives of this kind have inspired children’s books.

• 12 Iris Argaman, Avi Ofer, Bear and Fred. A World War II Story, trans. Annette Appel (New York: Amazon (...)
• 13 Pegy Poppe and Ann de Bode, Een pop voor Hannah (Wielsbeke: De Eenhoorn, 2018).
• 14 Agata Tuszyńska and Iwona Chmielewska. Mama zawsze wraca (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry, 2020)
• 15 Robin Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Chil (...)
• 16 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory; Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and (...)
• 17 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ (...)

5In this article, I discuss three of such picture books about the Holocaust produced by Israeli, Flemish and Polish authors. My sample includes Bear and Fred12 (2016) by Iris Argaman and Avi Ofer, Een pop voor Hannah13 [A doll for Hannah] (2018) by Pegy Poppe and Ann de Bode, and Mama zawsze wraca14 [Mum always comes back] (2020) by Agata Tuszyńska and Iwona Chmielewska. These books are very special not only because they are based on true events, but also because their young protagonists represent Holocaust survivors, and the toys featured in them represent their authentic playthings from that time, which today are put on display at the museums of Yad Vashem in Israel and Kazerne Dossin in Belgium. The discourse of children’s literature and the discourse of the Holocaust’s material culture intersect at this point and invite an examination of this interwovenness, as encouraged for example by Robin Bernstein: “Either to split or to lump children’s literature and material culture, however, is to erase representational play as many children’s lived connection between them.”15 In my argument, I will identify interconnections between the biographies of the protagonists and the biographies of play-things, whereby I will also establish how toys and their people are represented in the three picture books in order to determine what each of these books for a contemporary young readership tells them about the Holocaust. My theoretical framework draws on memory studies16 and thing theory, in particular its second phase, in which the being of objects is valued equally to the being of subjects, and researchers argue for the agency of nonhuman materials, insisting that not only humans, but also objects, interact.17

• 18 Domańska, “Humanistyka nie-antropocentryczna,” 14.
• 19 Tomi Ungerer, The Biography of a Teddy Bear (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1999).
• 20 Katarzyna Slany, “Zabawka jako medium pamięci o Holocauście na przykładzie picture booka Otto. Auto (...)
• 21 Slany, “Zabawka jako medium pamięci,” 455.
• 22 Domańska, “Humanistyka nie-antropocentryczna,” 14.
• 23 Krzysztof Abriszewski, “Teoria Aktora-Sieci Bruno Latoura,” Teksty Drugie 1–2 (2007): 121.
• 24 Rita Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 103 (2015): 740.
• 25 Justyna Tabaszewska, “Na granicy faktu. Kategoria faction w badaniach nad współczesnymi biografiami (...)

6As artefacts to be seen at museums and as protagonists of picture books, the survivors’ toys can be examined through a biographical lens, where “things possess a material identity and sometimes have multiple identities that change over time and across contexts; they live their own lives, which begin at point a and terminate at point b; something happens to them in this lifetime.”18 The very title of Tomi Ungerer’s Otto: The Biography of a Teddy Bear (1999)19, a classic of children’s literature on the Holocaust, provokes such a biographical approach, revealing that “it was the author’s intention to construct a historical-cultural life history of things.”20 Katarzyna Slany, who has scrutinized Otto from the biographical perspective, concludes that Ungerer “overcomes the culturally sanctioned conceptualization of things as objects by having Otto’s life history develop in parallel to people’s life histories.”21 I believe, however, that framing the fates of objects and people as concomitant is less about parallelisms and more about intertwining and reciprocities. The interactions that bear special relevance are those where a shift of perspective to a less anthropocentrically biased one can foster the perception of a thing as the Other that is, as Domańska insists,22 an equal, albeit perhaps less strong and less active participant both in the dialogue of cultures and in the reality construction process. The emphasis on the “process” ties in with Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which foregrounds the importance of relations among actors.23 Bringing together ANT and literary research, Rita Felski argues that the uniqueness of a work stems from its links to the social context.24 Of course, links to the social context need not necessarily concern concrete facts that have actually taken place or real people who have lived but, presumably, the existence in the real world of actors – in this case, the Holocaust survivors and their toys – will buttress the protagonists in literary texts and substantially enhance the uniqueness of the books I discuss. This may also be a meaningful factor in the reception of these books by today’s readers, adults and children alike, who currently appear to value the correspondence of narrated events to facts as the most important criterion in the selection and appreciation of literary works.25

• 26 Zekelman Holocaust Center, Lessing, Alfred (Fred). Oral History Department of Library Archive, acce (...)

7Therefore, let us have a look at the biographies of people and toys in the three picture books. Alfred Lessing, on whom the eponymous Fred in Bear and Fred is modelled, was born in the Hague (the Netherlands) to an assimilated Jewish family who moved to Delft soon afterwards. When the persecution of the Jews escalated in the Netherlands in 1942, the exacerbated purges prompted the family to split and hide separately. Going to his first hiding place, Fred was only able to take a rucksack and his beloved teddy bear, which from then on accompanied the boy throughout his wartime journey. Fred went through at least six hideouts, fell ill and was treated in a hospital for a few weeks. All the logistics was orchestrated by his mother. When she was arrested, the father and sons spent one more year in hiding together until the war was over. Fred’s mother survived Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Sobibór and Bergen-Belsen, and joined her family in the Netherlands after a long treatment in Algeria. In 1947, the family emigrated to the US, where Fred started a new life, obtained a PhD in philosophy and became a marital therapist.26 After the war, his teddy bear was also always with him as a witness of his lost childhood:

• 28 Lessing in Dafna Arad, “The Holocaust Told From the Perspective of a Teddy Bear,” The International (...)
• 29 Lessing in Zekelman Holocaust Center.

8In Lessing’s view, the teddy bear is thus a thing whose history has grown into his life to the point of becoming, as it were, its part, while at the same time remaining a thing that has its own biography. This is conveyed through the manner in which Lessing addresses his teddy bear: “I didn’t want to part from him, but Bear and I decided he should go. When he reached Israel, a new chapter began in his life.”28 Fred Lessing’s personality and the personality that he created for the toy have interpenetrated so thoroughly that the difference between the identities of the boy and the teddy bear has undergone a linguistic erasure. Concomitantly with perceiving the toy as a thing that has a subjectivity and a life of its own (“he’s had a life beyond me”), Fred felt a very strong connection to the teddy bear: “He’s always felt like a piece of me.”29

• 31 Kazerne Dossin Memorial Biografieën, Charlotte Hamburger, accessed May 7, 2023, https://kazernedoss (...)
• 32 Pegy Poppe and Ann de Bode, Een pop voor Hannah (Wielsbeke: De Eenhoorn, 2018): 2.

10Een pop voor Hannah [A doll for Hannah] is based on the life story of Charlotte Hamburger, the grandmother of Peggy Poppe, who penned the book. Arrested in April 1942, Hamburger made a rag doll for her four-year-old daughter Albertine (Tiny) when at prison, briefly before being transported to Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen and thence to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she was killed.31 The doll she had made was smuggled out of the prison and found its way into Tiny’s hands. Pegy Poppe, her daughter and the author of the book, also played with the doll as a child.32 In this way, the fates of the doll tie in with the fates of three women, with Tiny’s mother being at the same time the symbolic ‘mother’ of the doll. At the moment, the doll is on display at the museum of Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen.

• 33 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 53; Jocelyn Van (...)
• 34 Van Tuyl, “Dolls in Holocaust Children’s Literature,” 27.

11In the book, the mother character is called Esther. She secretly makes a doll called Charlotte for her daughter, who is named Hannah in the text. The doll’s name explicitly points to Charlotte Hamburger, who was separated from her daughter upon being imprisoned in 1942. The doll sports woolen plaits which are braided in exactly the same way as the plaits that Esther herself and her daughter are shown to be wearing in the illustrations. For Esther, hugging the doll and talking to it provides a surrogate of intimacy with her own child. While remaining a thing, the doll obtains the status of a subject as well. Like in other children’s stories in which dolls appear, the doll in this picture book is cast in the role of a daughter, yet the difference is that she is not a “daughter” to the young protagonist, which is usually the case,33 but to the adult mother. The effort of making the doll and the desire to pass it over to her daughter, despite the lethal risk this involves, are not only a therapy to the mother but also an attempt to create future prospects for the child, because, as observed by Jocelyn Van Tuyl, “having toys is related to having a future.”34 When the doll is ready, Esther, so to speak, entrusts her testament to the toy by showering it with advice and reflection, which she cannot communicate directly to her daughter:

• 36 Ibid., 33.
• 37 Ibid., 27.
• 38 Van Tuyl, “Dolls in Holocaust Children’s Literature,” 33.
• 39 Sarah D. Jordan, “Educating Without Overwhelming: Authorial Strategies in Children’s Holocaust Lite (...)

12Charlotte takes this legacy with her when, buried in a laundry basket, she is carried away by the prisoners’ relatives. The doll represents Esther on one more occasion in the tale when, after a danger-strewn journey, she is found in a dustbin by the grandma, who recognises the fabric of Esther’s petticoat in the doll’s dress: “She sits down in a chair and starts weeping. She strokes Charlotte lovingly and fondles her torn dress and her broken arm.”36 The damage the doll sustained underway is also symbolic, because the dog that grabbed and mauled Charlotte was a German Shepherd, while “there are such dogs in the prison as well.”37 This suggests that the grandmother’s tears are triggered both by the emotion aroused by Esther’s act of courage and by the fear about what is ahead of her. Like in multiple narratives about the Holocaust,38 the tarnished doll represents the loss of bodily autonomy and agency to which the victims were vulnerable. Young readers may fail to recognize this correlation because, as noted by Jordan,39 they may not have sufficient historical or psychological knowledge. Notably, the literary doll specifies some details of what befell the toy and Charlotte Hamburger, filling in certain blind spots in her story.

• 40 Zosia is an endearment of Zofia, a girl’s given name corresponding to English Sophie. In the passag (...)
• 41 “Doll Smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto: ‘Mothers Do Not Leave their Daughters.’” Yad Vashem, Featu (...)
• 42 Daniel W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Travistock, 1971).
• 43 Irit Abramski, Three Dolls ([Jerusalem:] Yad Vashem. International School for Holocaust Studies, 20 (...)
• 44 Renata Kim, “‘Nikt cię nie znajdzie’ – obiecała Zosi mama, gdy ukryła ją w piwnicy w getcie.” Newsw (...)

13Another doll in my paper, Zuzia [Susie] belongs to Zosia40 Zajczyk, a girl hidden by her mother in a basement in the Warsaw ghetto who took the name of Yael Rosner after the war.41 Zuzia’s biography is intertwined with the lives of the two women. Zosia and her mother survived the Holocaust and left Poland for Israel in 1950, where the mother died soon afterwards. The doll accompanied young Zosia on this journey and then adult Zofia throughout her life until the toy was given to Yad Vashem as an exhibit for the No Child’s Play show. When in hiding, the doll functioned as a “transitional object,” to use Donald Winnicott’s term,42 as she helped Zosia cope with being parted from her mother and better understand the situation.43 Mama zawsze wraca [Mum always comes back], a picture book by Tuszyńska and Chmielewska, also tells a story of motherly love, with the mother bringing her daughter a doll and other playthings in order to give her child a future. The plotline is based on Yael’s oral testimony. Her mother, Natalia Zajczyk, was a teacher before the war and as the war broke out, she became involved in smuggling children out of the Warsaw ghetto.44 She would bring various things to her three-year-old daughter, who knew no life other than in a ghetto basement, to tell her about the world and furnish her with something to play with in the long hours when her mother was away:

• 46 Abramski, Three Dolls, 25.

15Yael Rosner’s oral testimony contains a passage in which the mother asked by her daughter why the doll has only a head answers: “She is just a doll; I can arrange for her to have everything.”46 To the girl, being a mother meant being a person possessed of agency and capable of doing anything, a person who was up to anything to save her daughter and would never let her down. She became a mother to her doll, which the book phrases in a moving diction that echoes a child’s naive perspective:

• 48 Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls,” 162.

16From the girl’s point of view, a child is merely an object acted upon by adults and, like a doll, has no agency altogether. Being a mother to Zuzia the doll helped Zosia develop her own agency. At the same time, acting like a mother vis-à-vis Zuzia embodies “representational play”48 in that it reveals the stress and distress experienced by Natalia who, in her desperate attempts to save her daughter, had to be as severe to her as Zosia was to Zuzia:

• 50 Van Tuyl, “Dolls in Holocaust Children’s Literature,” 27.

17In Chmielewska’s illustrations, the doll is endowed with agency as well: together with Zosia, she arranges letters into her name and when playing, she gesticulates, smiles and, as a three-faced doll, lulls Zosia to sleep in the folds of her dress. Van Tuyl explains that “in Holocaust literature, liminal, not-living dolls are juxtaposed with liminal, living children who are in constant danger of death.”50 In Mama zawsze wraca [Mum always comes back], this opposition is mitigated by investing some agency in the doll. Such a representation of play where a thing – a toy – has subjectivity and agency makes one think of stories in which toys come to life, and the power of the imagination is brought to bear by helping a child be a child under all circumstances, paradoxically including those when, in play, children become adult mothers to their dolls.

• 51 Ibid., 29.
• 52 Poppe, De Bode, Een pop voor Hannah, 7.
• 53 Ibid., 36.

18The agency of the doll in Een pop voor Hannah [A doll for Hannah] is veritably extraordinary. From the beginning of her journey in a laundry basket, the doll takes over the narrative, feels cold, pain, fear and fatigue and can recognize danger. She experiences reality with all the senses. She is not as strong an actor as humans are and must rely on their help in extreme situations, such as an encounter with a dog, but she eventually manages to find her way to Hannah. The girl sees her mother’s semblance in the doll and at the same time becomes a mother to the toy, promising to look after it. The doll in its materiality represents thus the absent mother in the book. Van Tuyl states that “in survivor stories, dolls and toys may offer a way to grieve for the past and adapt to new life,”51 an insight that is certainly borne out by Charlotte the doll, which helps Hannah handle the loss of her mother and find joy in play. Hannah herself is a secondary character in the book, as her role in the plot is rather limited and she possessed very little agency. She is more of an object acted upon by other – adult – protagonists, such as her mother, who endeavors to do something for her daughter, defying the dire circumstances, and the grandparents, who take care of the young girl. The child’s passivity is aptly conveyed by an illustration in which Hannah is sitting motionless, having her hair braided.52 It is only when playing with the doll that the girl is able to acquire agency: “Hannah combs Charlotte’s hair right. She braids it anew. ‘Just like mum and me,’ she says delighted.”53

• 55 Argaman, Ofer, Bear and Fred, 29.

20The close link between the identities of the teddy bear and Fred is vividly conveyed in the book. It is via this link that Fred, as a Jewish child in wartime, stripped of any real agency and in most cases being an object of adults’ actions, gains agency through the toy. When Mama tells him that she has no other choice but to leave him, Bear reports: “At that moment, I understood – I had to take care of Fred!”55 The toy not only conducts the narrative in the book, but also consoles Fred, making the world a bit less frightening:

• 57 Nitsa Dori, “Children’s Toys and Games during the Shoah, as Reflected in Five Hebrew Books,” Journa (...)

21By taking care of the teddy bear that takes care of Fred, Fred in fact takes care of himself. This dual role performed by Fred is captured in an image on the cover of the Hebrew edition of the book, which pictures three figures: Fred holding Bear and Bear embracing a miniature of Fred. This play with the teddy bear and one’s own identity sheds a new light on the agency of Holocaust children: understanding but little of what was going around them, the children had to “grow up” quickly, just like Bear-the-narrator, and being still kids, they had to rely on help from toys in coping with loneliness, bereavement, precariously changing circumstances and various settings in which they found themselves while hiding. Toys gave them the “power of being needed.”57 Their toys from those times became part of their identities and of that reality, and as the age of the witnesses is drawing to an end, toys spin narratives on their behalf.

• 58 Dori, “Children’s Toys and Games during the Shoah,” 20; Dafna Arad, “Toys That Tell the Story of th (...)
• 59 Ibid., 20.
• 60 Ibid., 19.
• 61 Yehudit Inbar, “The Mona Lisa of Yad Vashem: The Teddy Bear that Fred Lessing Took with Him to His (...)

22The possession of “luxury” objects, such as toys, at a time when so many Jewish children had lived and died in atrocious conditions was taboo among the survivors for a long time58. This attitude incrementally changed, and the quantity of the toys donated to Yad Vashem illumined their enormous relevance as objects inextricably bound with childhood, irrespective of the circumstances in which it unfolds: “In the cruel atmosphere of the Shoah, toys and games continued to exist even after other cultural behaviors and consumer objects had already disappeared.”59 The toys gifted by the survivors to museums tell there the story of the youngest victims of the Holocaust to the following generations. As observed by Nitsa Dori, “learning about these objects and using them as a visual text, creates a connection to understanding the period – since these objects, the images appearing in them, and their traits, are part of the culture of the Jews of their times.”60 Fred Lessing’s teddy bear has been called “The Mona Lisa of Yad Vashem” by Yehudit Inbar, an organizer of the No Child’s Play exhibition.61 The teddy bear is small and dirty, has frayed fur and a patched head, and its eyes are sewn on with a red thread, but it is being exactly the way it is that it symbolizes the toys of all the children of the Holocaust, simultaneously commemorating their lost childhood and their young lost lives:

• 64 Poppe, De Bode, Een pop voor Hannah, 36.
• 65 Kazerne Dossin Memorial Biografieën, Charlotte Hamburger.
• 66 Kazerne Dossin Jaarverslag 2018, 2018 in vogelvlucht, accessed May 7, 2023, http://annualreport.kaz (...)

25In A Doll for Hannah, Hannah sews with her grandmother’s help a new dress for Charlotte and brushes and braids the doll’s hair. Charlotte’s old dress is “carefully put away” by the grandma.64 On the symbolic level, playing with the doll channels the transmission of history from generation to generation, with the preservation and storing of things – such as toys: a doll and its old dress made by the girl’s mother in prison – being pivotal gestures. The old generation’s care and commitment to safeguarding things are a salient guideline for memory transmission. The episode of making a new dress spotlights the need to “revive” memory, tend to it and give it a new form. On the one hand, the doll takes over the duties of Hannah’s mother, and on the other, the girl herself assumes the responsibility of looking after the doll. In extratextual reality, Tiny kept her promise as she donated the doll to the museum and started the Fonds Albertine de Houwer [Albertine de Houwer Foundation],65 in this way making sure that the memory of Charlotte Hamburger, her mother and a Holocaust victim, is perpetuated. On the level of materiality, the history of the doll on display at the Kazerne Dossin Museum is tightly knit with the histories of three women. It is in that real space that Charlotte Hamburger stayed, and it is to that space that she returns, not only as commemorated in a biography drawn up by the Museum, but also in the tale of A Doll for Hannah, which was presented at the Kazerne Dossin on 30 June 2018.66 On the level of the text, the fates of the doll are also intertwined with the fates of three generations. Poppe’s book makes one realize how the history of this object and the histories of Charlotte Hamburger, her daughter and her granddaughter interpenetrate. For their part, de Bode’s illustrations, designed in sepia tints and bringing to mind old photographs, add authenticity to the plotline. Both the doll itself as a museum exhibit and the story of it are part of contemporary Holocaust narratives.

• 67 Hamida Bosmajian, Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and (...)

26Some of the illustrations in Mum Always Comes Back are also stylized as old photographs or postcards, with elements of children’s world of play incorporated into them. The line between the real and the imagined worlds is blurred, as rendered in the figures of the characters that, so to speak, partly come out of yellowed pages, in parallel to people who come out of Yael’s tale years later. Other illustrations in the book offer an insight into the realities faced by the hiding girl, as they show a range of objects brought by her mother to the basement. The book is enringed by a white stripe with the embroidered pattern of a single flower from the dress of Zuzia the doll, which counterbalances the stigmatizing symbolism of the star of David on the armbands worn by the Jews. This device effectively provokes reconsidering the culturally entrenched Holocaust commemoration models and embracing a new, more individualized and more tender approach. The new band protects Zosia’s little big world enclosed in the book, encircling it with hope. Even if Tuszyńska’s text unveils this world in a stylized account of an adult witness, the narrator has not lost yet the naive view of a sensitive child whose perception of the world beyond the basement entirely relied on her mother’s stories and play with the objects she provided. This childlike viewpoint is also conveyed by some illustrations, notably by the double spread paired with the episode of hiding in the countryside, which shows a huge brown-and-gold dog with floppy ears and a friendly look in its eyes. A smiling, happy girl, wearing a headscarf with a flower print that mirrors Zuzia’s dress, is leaning on the dog. The image conveys the duality intrinsic to the account offered by Zofia Zajczyk, who remembers what was good in the cruel reality she had inhabited as a child and fully realized what it had meant only as an adult. The text contains a multiplicity of historically realistic details: the imperative of hiding, forged gentile documents, the lack of food, etc. While these details have educational value in that they communicate the realities of the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War, they are often very drastic, as in the torture scene where the mother loses her eye and the cruelty of a villager who makes Zosia hide in a doghouse. Clearly, this is not an example of literature that uses “spare the child’ strategies.”67 Quite the opposite, it employs confrontative solutions, which enhance the cognitive value of the narrative, especially when combined with the realization that Natalia, Zosia and her doll Zuzia had their counterparts in historical reality.

• 68 Domańska, “Humanistyka nie-antropocentryczna,” 15.

27The toys of Holocaust survivors are material objects that appear in children’s literature in the second decade of the twenty-first century and deserve to be addressed against a broader backdrop of the end of the era of the witness. Faced with this horizon, the toys carry on the narrative on behalf of the survivors with whose lives their own biographies interlaced. The fact that the representations acquire a new significance with the impending end of the era of the witness has already been foregrounded by the researchers of Holocaust photography. Narratives framed from the perspective of things reveal the agency of the objects. If, as averred by Domańska, “the more we humanize the thing, the greater chance we stand of developing non-anthropocentric approaches in the future,”68 the picture books discussed in this paper, in which the identities of toys are so thoroughly interlocked with the identities of humans, should be regarded as attempts to head in that direction. In the books by Israeli and Flemish authors, the agency of toys transpires in the fact that the narratives are spun by the toys, with the identities of the survivors and the toys brought together both on the verbal level of the text and in the illustrations. By taking care of the doll, Hannah takes care of the memory of her mother; Fred looks after Bear, and Bear looks after the boy. In the picture book by the Polish authors, the entwining of Zosia’s and Zuzia’s identities is most emphatically pictured in the book’s images. The books that relate the biographies of authentic toys and the people associated with them are expressions of the care for the memory of the Holocaust. The toys and their representations in children’s literature acquire agency in child-initiated play, and – in a reciprocal relation – the children (re)gain agency through their toys. This mode of presenting children’s play which manifests an intergenerational investment in the perpetuation of memory invites us to revise our ideas of how the memory of the Holocaust can continue to be transmitted in contemporary culture, as the end of the era of the witness is looming. The books appear to call for renewing the manners and channels of memory transmission to adjust them to contemporary audiences. The representation of play in the three picture books shows that, even in wartime, children were children and needed to play. This aspect of childhood that coincided with the Second World War and the Holocaust is brought into relief by the toys with which children – both those who died in the war and the Holocaust survivors nearing the end of their lives today – played at the time. In literature, their toys are given a new appearance and a form that the following generation of children may find attractive and appealing. Comparing the book illustrations and the real toys makes it clear that the revamping of toys is indispensable in order to arouse interest in children whose knowledge of the Holocaust is insufficient to appreciate the emotional and commemorative value of the real toys without the aid of a fitting narrative furnished with illustrations. At the same time, the picture books effectively prepare young readers for an encounter with a more complex history of the Holocaust. The relevance of the three books discussed in this paper seems to stem chiefly from bringing together the Holocaust survivors’ toys carefully preserved at museums and representational play in children’s literature. This combination brings to the fore the ways in which contemporary culture can commemorate the lost childhood of the children who survived the Holocaust and also those who perished then.