Maria Buko

Universität Konstanz

A Child’s Drawing and a Short Essay as an Egodocument of War 

I, who could never tease anyone or hate anyone, learnt to do so. Now I would beat everyone, or […] even hang. Just like they did. – wrote an 18-year-old Polish girl in a survey in 1945. After the violent events of World War Two, nearly 1.5 million orphans remained in Poland, which constituted as many as 22% of the whole generation. Their emotions and experiences were documented at the time through surveys, drawings and interviews. Under the German occupation of Poland, Polish pedagogues and psychologists developed research methods for recognising the war’s impact on children and youth. This allowed for the launching of the state-wide studies of Polish children in the immediate postwar period. Parallelly, a competition for children’s drawn and written memories of war was announced in a popular magazine. These projects resulted in around 3000 drawings, 6000 questionnaires, and 600 short essays collected. I aim to discuss these sources as ego documents of war-experiencing children in an attempt to recognize all their limitations but, at the same time, discuss their potential in uncovering at least a bit of subjective narration of one’s (piece of) biography of such an underrepresented contributor pool as children and youth.