As the project developed it dawned on me that at least I cannot be selective – that I cannot have as my main interest small Polish Christians and forget small Polish Jews, nor the other way around. Children are children – if we hear an infant cry in the dark we will never be able to guess his race or religion. The differences come later, with what is farcically called “education”.
It is said that we should learn from history but the only lesson history really, and thoroughly, teaches is that we learn nothing from it – so wars continue and their chief victims are always children. Thus my theme, starting as it does over half a century ago in my country of origin, encompasses all young victims, whoever they are, wherever they are and, sadly, wherever they will be.
In this group of 16 paintings I wanted to tell the whole story from the onset of war and who it would be blindly directed at, to the perpetrators, the treating of infant Man like a machine, the imposed and enthusiastically enforced disregard for his spirit, the humiliation, his hopes for salvation, and the ultimate disappearance.
Where the children are naked there is intentionally no indication of gender as this bore absolutely no influence on their fate. This genderlessness also gives the figures a more spiritual, less biological quality: I wanted the children to become monumental, in a sort of poem to the unsung.
