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A Child's Hope: In the words of a child murdered in the Nazi holocaust


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This exhibit features several dolls confiscated from murdered Jewish children, so long forgotten in the hands of and tucked out of sight by their killers. Also in this exhibit, is a 1933 photograph of a child named Anna Lipschitz (Born in Hungary) who holds her doll not unlike those here. She was murdered at the hands of the Nazis on August 15 of 1944. Her silent little face speaks for the stolen voices, the unlived lives. A child's hope. Words for which there are no words, best described by that silence. Words as the two left here penned to the lapel of a doll - speaking for not only Anna, but the entirety of nearly 2 million children, their vastly left unpoken voices said no better than by the minute and wavering pen mark. Upon the doll that bears what appears to be real human hair - perhaps sheared from the children gone before - perhaps even little Anna - to their deaths in the concentration camps. Little spatters, specks of red brown blood are still visible beside the pen mark. This very doll was pried from the hands and heart of a child murdered in the Nazi holocaust - piled into the massive heaps of confiscated possessions. It reads simply "Lili Marlene" It is the title of a German love song which became popular during the war with soldiers of both sides, but a symbol of hope and reminder of normalcy among the resistance networks. A song that embodied what they fought to one day regain, the humanity and normalcy of daily life, the right to one day again become human - to once more return home. The minute triumphs and tragedies of the lives they knew before. Lili marlene was this vision - her name not only eternally the voice of a child’s last hope, but for all lives - the common longings consumed by the tides of war. This doll is as the song's haunting melody " Wie Einst Lili Marlene" The one and only, Lili marlene.

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