The exhibit No Child's Play at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem presents the photos, drawings, toys, dolls, and board games of children who were victims of the Holocaust. Of the ca. 6 million persons killed, one and a half million were children. The intent of the site is to provide viewers with insight into the lives of children during the Shoah by focusing on the personal stories and material culture of those few who survived. The children's stories are presented here with texts and images, written and edited by Yehudit Inbar, curator of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This collection of narratives and artifacts reveals that children found comfort and companionship in the material culture of their childhood that also enabled them to create a reality different from that which surrounded them. Moreover, the array of child-centered documentary sources demonstrates how children provided their parents with encouragement, hope, in addition to money and food, that enabled them to continue their desperate daily fight for survival. The introduction is followed by a sequence of chronologically-organized links: the world of children before the war; in the shadow of the war; in the ghettos and the camps; in hiding, and in their new life. The viewer can easily click through the individual pages of each chapter—which contain between three to 15 images—while maintaining direct access to the chapter titles located in the left-hand navigation bar.

The texts that accompany the images offer useful explanations and clearly highlight their significance in a broader context. As the author emphasizes about the photographs in the "Before the War" section, all children lived their own individual lives, and none of the images present anything unusual or extraordinary. These images of ordinary children's lives underscore, however, the horror that was to come. During the war, many parents tried to save their children by sending them abroad. Youth Aliyah, for instance, successfully sent some 5,000 children to Palestine, while 9,000 left Germany after Kristallnacht for Great Britain. The rising tide of anti-Semitism, however, forced the return of refugees such as Liesel Joseph, a passenger on the ill-fated Saint Louis. The ocean liner depicted in Liesels colorful drawing that was prevented from disembarking Jewish passengers in Cuba returned to Europe.

The chapter, "Ghettos and Camps," includes illustrations of pre-ghetto life by Czech artist Bedrich Fritta created in celebration of his son's third birthday. Also included are several illustrations of the Theresienstadt ghetto drawn by an artistically talented teenage boy and dolls owned by two survivors whose stories also shed light on the enormous importance of toys to children living in ghettos and camps. There are even photos of a monopoly-like board game created in a graphics workshop engaged in underground activities that sought to provide children with useful information about how to survive the ghetto. (Unfortunately, much of the text printed on the game board and playing cards is frustratingly illegible in the site's magnified version.)

For the section "In Hiding" the curator/editor included a selection of photographs of children with classmates and toys, as well as the teddy bear that belonged to a boy while hidden in Holland by a Christian family. The recollections of survivors included throughout the site provide unique insight into the personal meanings of children's possessions in a historically-specific context. The final section, "Toward a New Life," consists of only three black and white photos of groups of children and one boy who did not want to let go of a toy gun once he had been liberated from Buchenwald.

However small the selection of sources, No Child's Play is sure to provide students with a deeper understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on children by giving voice to its victims. Teachers might find the need to include supplementary sources (both primary and secondary) due to the site's scant documentation of the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no guide to additional resources, however. And, in the absence of useful teaching strategies, instructors might find it helpful to discuss with their students the different methods of analysis needed to unpack the variety of documentary sources—photographs, artifacts, narratives, etc.—that were created by and for children of the Holocaust.

"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man…It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. . . As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians…The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them..."

. . . The assignment to create the road sign landed on the desk of Caltrans graphic artist John Hood in the late 1980s. He was asked to design an image that, in the blink of an eye, would alert drivers to the unexpected sight of pedestrians in their headlights. Before Hood began drawing the sign, he and his supervisors met with Highway Patrol officers and saw photos of accident scenes. What got to him most were the deaths that involved families. "Graphically, I wanted to show a family," said Hood, who lives in San Diego. He chose to include a pigtailed girl, rather than a boy, because "there is something about a little girl running across with her parents that we are more affected by."

At first he drew detailed figures, with faces that showed "a little bit of fright." But, in the end, Hood and his supervisors decided on a silhouette. "When you are looking through headlights, that is what you see," Hood said, "an outline of the image itself." As he sketched, Hood tried to imagine the despair that might drive such a family across the border and onto a forbidding foreign highway. He drew from his own experience fighting in Vietnam, where he had seen families run for their lives as villages were attacked. He remembered stories his Navajo parents had told him about ancestors who died trying to escape as U.S. soldiers marched them onto reservations.

The drawing was finished in a week. Even without faces, the characters conveyed a sense of urgency in their flight. "It doesn't just mean they are running across the freeway," Hood said. "It means they are running from something else as well. I think it's a struggle for a lot of things, for opportunities, for freedom."

Imagine walking down a hallway lined with photographs. Now imagine walking through a labyrinth of hallways with 10 million photographs and drawings, the approximate number of images available in the LIFE photo archive, hosted by Google.

On one wall, a black-and-white photograph shows a white baby perched on the edge of a sink holding a toothbrush in its mouth. On another, an African American toddler sits snuggled in a blanket on a shelter chair during a flood in Louisville, Kentucky. Still other images show two daughters of Czar Nicholas II of Russia on an outdoor patio, school children in Ecuador waving flags during a visit by U.S. President Richard Nixon, uniform-clad boys in the Nazi Youth Movement marching in formation, or an 11-year-old Amish girl shooting marbles in the U.S. national girls' tournament.

This remarkable collection is a visual goldmine. Teachers and students of an almost endless number of topics related to children and youth in American and world history can explore for hours, searching photographs and drawings from the 1750s to the present, most of which are seen publicly for the first time on this website. The majority of the images come from the 20th century, showcasing the work of famous photographers, such as Gordon Park, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Margaret Bourke-White, among many others.

Exploring this archive, however, is at once fascinating, rewarding, and incredibly frustrating. Search results are capped at a maximum of 200 images, meaning that a search on "children" returns only a tiny fraction of the possible matches. Some images are presented with basic source information, such as title, location, date, photographer, and image size while others provide no information at all, leaving the viewer with many unanswered questions.

Some images are part of collections, such as the hundreds of "Gibson Girls" drawings or the "Circus Girl" photographs taken in 1952. In the right column, "related images" sometimes appear and many of the images are tagged with "labels" that offer pathways through the mass of images. An image of a baby, for example, might lead to a tag for "baby carriage," "children at play," "blind children," or "child care," all of which lead down other paths or abruptly end. Or an image might link to no other images, sending you back to the beginning to find another path.

Photographs appear in three sizes: small, medium, and large. Images are presented at 300 dpi and even the medium-sized images are of decent size for classroom use, roughly 400 x 600 pixels. The larger scans contain a LIFE watermark and while all images are available at no cost for personal and research purposes, the archive also offers each image for sale, framed, at a cost of $79.99 and up.

The photographs as a whole depict a range of childhood experiences, from famous young people in formal settings (Shirley Temple on her 11th birthday "wearing her first long dress, a fluffy frock of marquisette trimmed with a dubonnet ribbon") to ordinary children engaged in everyday activities, such as the children at a Turkish tobacco factory daycare "where working moms drop their kids during their day shift."

Spanning several centuries and many borders, this collection provides a glimpse into many different experiences of childhood and youth. Students could examine a range of customs across time and culture, exploring, for example, the material culture of childhood from swaddling to cribs or the role of institutions, such as schools, hospitals, orphanages, in the lives of young people. Even more revealing, however, would be an assignment exploring what the words and images found within this archive tell us about the society that produced and consumed Life magazine—the photographers, editors, writers, and subscribers who interacted with these images and created meaning from them day to day.

The caption next to the young girl in the shelter, for example, reads, "Lonely little African-American baby sucking her thumb." Next to a 1938 photograph from Romania is the caption, "A Gypsy lighting the small oven while holding her dirty child." White children are rarely described as "lonely" or "dirty," even when collected under the label "poverty."

The subjects selected are equally telling. Several photographs of African mothers nursing their newborns focus on the women's breasts and nipples. Other women from Myanmar, Vietnam, Finland, Albania, Pakistan, and Israel are also shown nursing. Compare this to images of white women with their young, fully dressed and often, in the mid-20th century, with a bottle. What does this say about perceptions of motherhood, gender, and child rearing? About gender, race, and nationality?

This rich archive can provide primary source material on a host of national and international topics, from dress, play, education, and health to national identity and international relations. Whether looking for something specific, such as images from a 1951 hearing on comic books, or broad, such as high school, you will likely find many images worth exploring. The images are high enough quality to print and use easily for research or class assignments. Keep in mind, however, that despite the powerful Google search engine, in some ways you are left to wander through the labyrinth unguided, without a map that might provide a sense of how images fit into the collection as a whole. It is hard to know exactly what a given search term will return and with the limit on search results, it is impossible to see the full range of images on many topics. It is, however, a worthwhile adventure if you begin with patience and creativity.

Captain of Industry

Butch wants a bicycle! Lots of lawn and lemonade and baby-sitting lie between Butch and that bike, but we’re betting on the boy. He has energy, vision, and our national habit of working hard for what he wants. He’s American business – in miniature.

There are many names for Butch’s philosophy. You can call it Free Enterprise, Opportunity, Democracy, or Capitalism, if you want.

But whatever the name, America owes it much. For our most valuable natural resource lies in the ambition and initiative of Americans like Butch.

As great publications have grown from the dreams of young men with old hand-presses – the electric industry had small beginnings, too. A few men with vision strung the first short lines. People with faith risked their savings. Better and better service, at lower and lower cost, created more and more jobs – and carried the benefits of electric living to more and more people.

Free enterprise—and hard work—will bring Butch and his bike together. They are what built America and the American way of life. No nation on earth has found a satisfactory substitute for that combination.”

Listen to the New Electric Hour – the HOUR OF CHARM. Sundays, 4:30 P.M., EDT, CBS.

America’s business-managed, tax-paying
ELECTRIC LIGHT AND POWER COMPANIES.