November 21st 2019 to March 31st 2019

Drawn. The «children of Buchenwald» on Zugerberg Mountain 

“And one Monday morning the children finally arrived. The «children», however, turned out to be young fellows aged 18 and upwards. [...] But when we saw these adolescent lads with their stubbly beards and hairy legs! we began to feel a little uneasy, particularly in view of the children’s songs we had learnt. [...] We soon realised that they were indeed still children [...]. They were so mature, experienced and ‘old’ because of what they had been through at the concentration camps, that we were desperate to give them back their youth.”
Liselotte Walz, diary, 1945

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, 374 young adults and children from the liberated concentration camp at Buchenwald were invited to come and recuperate in Switzerland. The group became known as the “children of Buchenwald”. In the summer of 1945 the Felsenegg youth residential home on Zugerberg mountain served as a convalescent home for 107 of them. Their drawings are a special historical record of the Holocaust. The childlike drawings are in stark contrast to the inhumane living conditions depicted and the daily struggle for survival at the camp. The pictures created by Kalman Landau and by Thomas Geve illustrate this particularly well. Much like storyboards for movie scripts or comic strips, they tell stories of arrest, deportation, maltreatment, torture and death, but also of survival, liberation and a new beginning. The exhibition at the Zug Castle Museum shows for the first time more than 150 such drawings and other documents from the estates of the carers.

The exhibition by guest curator Manuel Fabritz bases on his research project «Performative Räume. Von Buchenwald in die Schweiz» of the Institute for the Perfoming Arts and FIlm (IPF) of Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK). Manuel Fabritz teaches scenography at IPF. 

download exhibition flyer

Private guided tours
We are happy to guide you and your group through the exhibition. On demande we indulce you at the end with one of our selfmade aperos.
Kindly contact us with the form below. 

Guided tours for school classes
Kindly book dialogical guided tours through the exhibition for classes aged secondary level I and II with the form below. For more information kindly contact Regula Hauser: rhauser@burgzug.ch or 041 728 29 74 (Wed to Fri)

The exhibition is supported by:
       
                                   

Online:

• Arttv.ch: "Gezeichneter Holocaust.", 16. Januar 2019
• The Zug Post. Online Newspaper: "Exhibition of drawings by boys who survived Buchenwald", Dezember 2018
• ETH Life: "Humanität mit Hindernissen", Artikel über die vom Archiv für Zeitgeschichte an der ETH publizierte Studie von Madeleine Lerf zum Thema «Buchenwaldkinder», 15. Juni 2010