Painting Czeslawa Kwoka, Honoring Children of the Holocaust

This collaboration between painter Lori Schreiner and poet Theresa Senato Edwards was inspired by photographs taken at Auschwitz by Holocaust survivor Wilhelm Brasse. The photographs sent Schreiner to the canvas and her paintings set Edwards' pen to paper. The resulting collaboration brings the children behind the images to life, gives perspective and dimension to their personhood, lends vitality to their memory. The reader gets a sense of what each individual child might have been like, what each little life might have meant. The children portrayed in this work came from Belgium, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine; they were Jewish, Roman Catholic, Jehovah's Witness, Gypsy, mixed race, gay. They are representative of the spectrum of lives lost in the Holocaust. The art and poetry in this book juxtapose indelible lives with catalogued identification numbers as the artists confront the inhumanity of the Holocaust, bringing the reader along to witness. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland provided information about the children in this book and granted permission to reproduce their photographs.