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of the medal, Righteous Among the Nations, and a person saved from the Holocaust.
Later the young people wrote letters to them and to Henio. On 19th April 2006, at
5pm, the NN Theatre mounted a letterbox in front of present day PKO S.A. Bank, at
64 Krakowskie Przedmieście St. where Henio had his last photograph taken before the
war. The senders put their letters there. The programme included a walk along Henios
dwelling places: the family house at 3 Szewska St. and the ghetto home at 11 Kowalska St.
The walk ended at the last preserved Jewish town street lamp in Podwale St.
3. The School Guide — Life of Children in Majdanek
Another initiative, the exhibition, the School Guide — Life of Children in Majdanek,
accompanied by a four-year-long educational programme of the State Museum
at Majdanek, also tells the story of Henio's life 5 .
Neither the exhibition nor the programme is exclusively focused on Jewish children
— the camp prisoners. We get to know the life stories of Polish and Belarussian children
as well. Both undertakings, by recalling two biographies of Jewish children: Henio and
Halina Birenbaum — a fourteen-year-old Warsaw ghetto inhabitant — show the life of
Jewish children who found themselves in a concentration camp as a result of the Reinhardt
Action (the extermination programme in General Governorship region).
Before seeing the exhibition, the pupils have classes on the violation of childrens
rights during the Nazi occupation. While at the museum, the schoolchildren watch
films about the camp and children's fate during the Second World War, work on historical
documents and biographic articles and present the collected pieces of this information
during the visit to the camp area. Before visiting the School Guide exhibition,
the schoolchildren are partly familiar with the story of the camp children and are able
to tell the biographies of the main characters. After seeing the exhibition and hearing
the witnesses' testimonies, they talk to the guide and prepare a book — a school guide -
in which every letter of the alphabet is supplemented with words describing the physical
and psychological aspects of life in the camp. After the museum visit the teachers
are requested to hold more discussions in their classes about the pupils' observations at
Majdanek and to help them prepare their own reflection on the subject, in whatever
form, and deliver it to the museum. This follow-up work testifies to the effects of the
programmes 6 . Our experience shows that the schoolchildren in all their written works,
besides displaying extensive knowledge of the Majdanek children, attach strong attention
to the fact that the camp visit revolutionized their perception of the world. The
works are dominated by the opinions that the exhibition teaches the meaning of toler-
5 More on the Project in: GRUDZIŃSKA M.: Wystawa Elementarz. "Pro Memoria" 2006, Issue 24,
pp. 79-83; [online:] http://tnn.lublin.pl/elementarz/
6 Ibid.
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