Poland in Indonesia

"A child is not a soldier, he does not defend the homeland, although he suffers with it" The maxim quoted here by Janusz Korczak, the great pedagogue - a friend of children, is the motto of our project, because, like the Old Doctor, we want to emphasize that a child is not a soldier, even if he fights with arms in his hands, and that he suffers because he is always a victim of war. We want to look at the war through the eyes of children and listen to their emotions, recognizing the works they made as extremely poignant testimonies of war. The exhibition includes historical drawings by Polish children from 1946, recording their experiences during World War II and the German occupation of 1939-1945, stored in the Archives of New Records in Warsaw, in the Ministry of Education complex from 1945-1966, and contemporary drawings by Ukrainian children, related to the war currently taking place in Ukraine, collected on the Mom I see war portal.  The similarity of the historical and contemporary works is striking - war from a child's perspective always looks the same. Children draw tanks, planes dropping bombs, fires and explosions. They draw the wounded and dead, ruined houses, graves. They draw themselves and their families, they draw evacuation and escape. But they also draw hope and their dreams for the future. By combining images and words into thematic groupings: battle, occupation, family, repression, resistance, destruction, hope-winning, we want to emphasize the fact of how similar the scenarios of the partition wars are. The time changes, the place changes, the child witnesses change, but the war is always the same: "War does not see, does not hear, does not feel" (J. J. Letria). Currently, there are more than 7,000 drawings in the collection of the Archive of New Records in Warsaw.

The exhibition will be opened by Ambassador Beata Stoczynska, Ambassador of Ukraine Vasyl Hamianin and University Rector Prof. Dr. Ernawati Sinaga. In addition to representatives of the Embassy of Poland and the Embassy of Ukraine in Jakarta, the opening ceremony will be attended by students and faculty of Universital National and invited guests including Prof. Prof. Dr. Yuddy Chrisnandi, former Indonesian Ambassador to Ukraine.