About the exhibition
Forty-eight third-graders at the Jewish elementary school in Munich have assembled in the schoolyard for a class photo—a snapshot from the summer of 1937. This is the last picture on which the children appeared together. The photo provides the starting point for an intensive search to find out what happened to them. The exhibition traces the children’s life paths. It investigates their strategies for survival, the routes by which they fled, their experiences of alienation and loss, and their arrival in a new place. It uses blank spaces to visualize the absence of those who became victims of the Nazis’ annihilation policies. This paves the way for more general questions: What does it mean to be a child in times of inhumanity? How do the loss of home and forced migration shape children? And what longer-term effects do these experiences have on their families?
The exhibition is based on an idea and research by the historians Kristina Milz and Julia Schneidawind. Their work is scheduled to be published as a book by C.H. Beck Verlag in fall 2026.