photo #8933854

Tereska was a young girl living in a residential institution for emotionally disturbed children in post war Poland. She had spent her early childhood inside a Nazi concentration camp, an experience that profoundly shaped her psychological development. In 1948 she was photographed standing at a blackboard after being asked a simple question, to draw her home. What she produced was not a recognisable house or familiar domestic scene, but a chaotic web of lines and shapes, devoid of order or perspective. To modern observers the drawing is deeply unsettling, yet to psychologists and historians it offered a stark visual expression of trauma. The absence of structure reflected a child whose sense of safety, stability and normal family life had never properly formed. The photograph was taken by American photojournalist David Seymour, known as Chim, a co founder of Magnum Photos. Seymour documented the effects of war on children across Europe, and Tereska’s drawing became one of the most haunting images of his work. It encapsulated the invisible damage left behind after the physical destruction of the second world war had ended. Tereska’s fate after the photograph remains unknown, which adds to the image’s power. She stands as a symbol rather than an individual biography, representing thousands of children who survived camps, ghettos and displacement, yet carried the psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Her drawing is not a failure to understand the idea of home, but a reflection of a childhood in which the concept itself had been violently erased. © Historical Photos #archaeohistories