Reflections on the Children & Heritage Colloquium

One of my strongest lasting memories from attending the Children and Heritage colloquium is of a piece of artwork at the Foundling Museum in London, presented to us by the museum’s Director, Caro Howell, during her keynote lecture. The piece was plain and simple: a row of white shirts hanging on hooks on a wall, with a quote sewn in as a label to each collar. These quotes are jarring and horrific, and are taken from the memories of children who grew up in care: ‘you’re a liar’, they say, along with ‘why are you always so annoying’, and ‘it’s all your fault as usual’. The power of this artwork is its simplicity: the uniform shirts all alike and the quotes placed as labels draw our attention to how individual children have been homogenized and – quite literally – labeled into the monolithic category of those in care. This struck a chord with my own research on Jewish youth during the Holocaust, where classification and dehumanization were a part of everyday life. It also crystallized some of the themes that so characterized the conference for me: that of understanding children’s experiences through their own eyes, of thinking about the physical spaces and objects they used, and of presenting their histories to the public today.

These are themes that give agency to the people at the center of their history, while not downplaying the immense force of larger narratives that often dictated their lives. Finding this balance in historical research is highly challenging – each individual history is unique and deserves attention, but the writing of history requires identifying patterns and placing people’s lives within the broader context of the time. The colloquium addressed this issue by highlighting the almost eternal existence of children in history, even when it isn’t explicitly stated in records. Matthew Grenby’s presentation on young people at heritage sites throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, for example, spoke about the silences in the archive relating to children’s presence. He showed how, while museums and other sites warned that ‘they who have tickets are desired not to bring children’, young people nonetheless were present in these spaces, particularly as part of family visits. In so doing, Grenby placed children within multiple narratives: that of the museum sometimes reluctant to their presence, that of the family, and – of course – that of their own experiences too. Thinking about how children wove through these competing narratives helps us perceive them as actors within history, rather than merely products of it.

When understanding children’s position within history, their physical environment – the spaces and objects they interacted with – also becomes important. In my own research, place can be central for young people’s development, be it the family home, school, or, later in the Holocaust, the ghetto and concentration camp. It is through these spaces that children recognise and express feelings of safety, identity, and danger. Simultaneously, acts of persecution, hiding, and resistance brought new meaning to old spaces as much as they created new spaces too. With this in mind, when I looked at the shirts in the artwork from the Foundling Museum, I saw how an ordinary-looking physical item, within an ordinary-looking place, could take on a much greater and more powerful meaning. Approaching the issue of materiality, the colloquium showcased multiple children’s spaces: a school, a household nursery room, and a children’s home. Each of these places engaged – to varying degrees – with the idea of power structures and expectations. Particularly insightful was Marta Gutman’s paper on public schools and the heritage of black children in Harlem, 1930-1970. Reflecting on years where schools became a battleground for civil rights, as well as the ways specific areas assumed cultural meanings, Gutman’s paper complicated the idea of power in places where it was contested. Thinking about the spaces children inhabited and the ways they interacted with them thus reveals much about children’s position within shifting power-dynamics.

These perspectives add much to our understanding of children’s lives in the past: the ways they acted, the places they inhabited, and the activities within which they took part. This colloquium, however, focused on a second aspect, too: children within heritage settings today. In other words, that of children’s lives today and how they themselves engage with the past. As an aspiring academic who researches the Holocaust, public engagement and outreach are key parts of my work. Young people are often the recipients of this, through outreach events to school groups at College or Holocaust Memorial Day events at school, in the community, and – increasingly – online. Presenting the history of the Holocaust, and particularly the impact of the Holocaust on children, is a challenging task. As with the shirts at the Foundling Museum, it deals with a traumatic and painful part of history that is steeped in emotion. Hearing from academics and practitioners at the colloquium about how museums, heritage sites, and other organisations engage children with their history was, therefore, a thought-provoking opportunity. It also reminded me of something fundamentally important for work in the history of childhood – and indeed for history in general – that researching, writing, and presenting the past is a joint effort between us as historians and our sources, their authors, and the people that they are about. As Caro Howell put it when talking about the history of the Foundling Hospital, it is a ‘shared history and a shared present’.

Watch the colloquium sessions here. 

Explore the colloquium programme here. 

Barnabas Balint is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr Zoe Waxman. His multi-lingual research (in English, French, and Hungarian) combines the history of childhood, gender, and identity, to explore Jewish responses to persecution. Currently, his PhD project focuses on developing age as an intersectional category of analysis for Jewish youth in Hungary during the Holocaust.

Find out more about the National Trust Partnership here.

Find out more about the Centre for the History of Childhood .

Find out more about the TORCH Heritage Programme here.