I was alone in the world, a boy alone in the world… but the light, there was always some sort of light…” This is how the great Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld described his childhood as a Holocaust survivor.
For Hungarian-born John Hajdu that light was Teddy. The little bear that fits neatly into the palm of his hand has remained with him since he was a three-year-old escaping the Nazis. Tiny Teddy was the only toy he could take when he was hidden in a cupboard by an aunt before being forced into the Budapest Ghetto.
His father was sent to a labour camp and his mother to Mauthausen in October 1944. Reunited with his parents after Soviet troops liberated the ghetto in January 1945, he and his mother faced another hurdle ten years later after the Soviet quashing of the Hungarian Uprising. They escaped under dark over icy rivers, walking 25 miles to reach Austria – and finally Britain in 1957. Teddy was always with him.
Now 89, and a grandfather of four, Hajdu has agreed to part briefly with Teddy, which is one of the toys featured in a new exhibition, Childhood in War, at London’s Imperial War Museum. Teddy will keep company with other children’s toys, books and personal testimonies that preserved something of their broken childhoods when war broke out in Europe, Ukraine, Sudan and Afghanistan.
To a child facing war, a teddy bear or a doll brought a flavour of home into a world that had turned dark.
Fleeing the 1939 invasion of Poland with her family, Ina Rennert-Rakavy realised her teddy bear Miszou was missing, later recalling: “I ran and hid under a tree... and I remember my mum running to the car just to bring me my teddy bear.”
Colette, a glamorous doll which comforted four-year-old Claudine Schwartz-Rudel when she and her family were forced to flee Nazi-occupied Paris, actually helped save her relatives’ lives. Inside the doll, her mother had hidden precious stones, and she sold one every time the family needed food or accommodation on their long journey to survival.
“I didn’t have anything to play. I was six years old, and… I used to play with the chickens and the straw,” said Sarah (later Sheila) Peretz Etons, who was hidden by a Polish Catholic policeman in his chicken coop for three years. She finally emigrated to Israel and then the US.
Sophie Turner-Zaretsky was given a stuffed bear by her mother after her father acquired false documents, enabling them to escape occupied Lviv in 1942. She named the bear Refugee, and it stayed with her for 50 years, throughout her time in hiding under the identity of Zofia, a Catholic, in Poland, and during her new life in England and later the US.
Sophie’s teddy bear, other toy animals, puppets, wooden toys, board games and other “much-loved” toys offered comfort and companionship to children while in hiding, on the Kindertransport, or after liberation from internment camps. They restored a sense of normal childhood.
Some 1.5 million Jewish children died during the Holocaust. In Terezin, a transit camp for Auschwitz, children passed toys to one another, in the knowledge that they could be deported to the death camp at any time. Those deported left their precious belongings to others. A Monopoly-type board game, Ghetto, made for the children of Terezin, is on display at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, alongside a doll dressed in the striped uniform of Auschwitz. In the Warsaw Ghetto, a child made paper dolls to resemble Tarzan.
Yet, how much of their childhood really remained with them? One child survivor recalled “old people with children’s faces, without a trace of joy, happiness, or childish innocence”.
But the light so perceptively described by Appelfeld also lent children in hiding or danger a chance to improvise games or make their own toys, even if they had brought nothing from home.
They were resourceful enough to create imaginative play, drawing and writing, expressing hopes, dreams and fears. Even when facing death.
Childhood in War is at the Imperial War Museum until February 28, 2027. The exhibition is free. For more information, click here
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