Don't forget to stop by the exhibition of No Child's Play in our Center's lobby. This incredibly powerful exhibit explores the child's world of play and toys during the most perilous times of the Holocaust. Most fragile and yet in some ways the strongest, children developed unique tools for existence, among them fantasy, creativity and play; all the manifestations of the basic instinct of survival. The title "No Child’s Play" is taken from a quote by the renowned pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak, director of Warsaw’s progressive and democratic orphanage who took care of hundreds of children before and during the war and who felt that games and play were of significant importance to children. He recognized the social and psychological value of toys and games and their sustainable value as tools for survival but in 1942, refusing to leave his wards, he was sent with them to their deaths in Treblinka. Approximately 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust and the exhibit is a testimony to fantasy, creativity and emotional resiliency. Korczak’s declarations of children’s rights were posthumously adopted by the United Nations as its Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

This exhibit was debuted in the United States at the first United Nations International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust in 2006. Since then, the exhibit has traveled to many museums and schools around the country.

(This exhibit is on loan from The American Society for Yad Vashem, Inc. Eli Zborowski, Chairman.)