A Coloring Book of Catastrophe : Drawings at Children’s Museum by Young Refugees From El Salvador and Guatemala Depict the Horrors of War

At the Children’s Museum in downtown Los Angeles there hangs a row of drawings on irregular pieces of paper, displayed about chest-high to an adult. They are the work of keen-eyed observers.

Telling only what they have seen without dramatizing or editorializing, these artists depict soldiers as big and heavy-booted men. The soldiers’ guns and polka-dotted camouflage uniforms are drawn in detail befitting their dominance. In a show of aggression, some of the soldiers bare their teeth.

Dotted lines--signifying the path of bullets--connect the soldiers’ guns to the dead. The victims have little detail or individuality. Mostly they are stick figures, blotched with red.

Janet Spritzler Levin collected some of the drawings last year from 7- to 14-year-old Guatemalan children at the San Caralampio Refugee Camp in Mexico. Because they were reporting events they had witnessed, Levin said, the children accurately documented a power relationship in which soldiers and helicopters loom larger than the children and their families, who were rendered powerless as they were driven from their homes by war.

“The kids drawing these pictures clearly get the relationship between soldiers and death,” Levin said.

For the Children’s Museum exhibit, “War Through the Eyes of Children,” Levin’s drawings were paired with Salvadoran children’s drawings smuggled out of a refugee camp in Honduras by William Vornberger of Washington, D.C. (The Los Angeles Sanctuary Committee was responsible for bringing the two collections together.) The Salvadoran drawings were elicited by camp teachers who used them as a form of therapy for children who survived the massacre of family members, friends and other children.

Vornberger wants viewers to make a connection between U.S. policy in Central America and the chilling subject matter of the pictures. “In a sense,” he contends, “we’re directly responsible for what you see in these drawings.”

Levin said she hopes the crayon drawings will “get people to look at what they don’t want to look at.”

Inspired by Slide Show

A former teacher who now works in a naturopathic clinic in Seattle, Levin was inspired to collect the drawings while watching a slide show on Central America. One slide was of a child’s drawing with the word “Salevnos” (Save Us) at the center. So urgent was the plea, Levin said, that she decided something had to be done for refugee children growing up with “memories of fear and flight.”

While working with inner-city children in the Philadelphia public schools, Levin, 37, learned that drawing is a good way for children to express memories and feelings that they may not be able to talk about.

Levin met Bishop Samuel Ruiz during his visit to Seattle to publicize the hardships of Guatemalan refugees living in his diocese in Southern Mexico. She explained that she hoped to make a book of drawings by refugee children, and Ruiz invited her to return with him. She spent a week in the San Caralampio refugee camp in March, 1985.

Levin said that the first day she asked the children to draw from their memories of life in their village in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala, and explain in pictures why they had left there. The second day they were to report on their journey on foot to Mexico and life in the camp. The third day was free choice.

Of 300 drawings Levin gathered, only 20 show no violence. Only four include an archetypal symbol of harmony, a shining sun. There are no smiling faces, birds or blue skies.

“It was the kids that wouldn’t draw at all that were the ones to be really worried about,” Levin said.

Bloody Massacres

Many children in the camp Vornberger visited in 1984 had, witnessed the bloody massacres at the Lempa and Sumpul Rivers, he said, as well as the Mozote massacre in which 280 children under the age of 14 were killed in one village alone. (There were nine villages involved.) The young survivors of these events drew the most disturbing scenes, some of which are reproduced in a just-released book of Salvadoran children’s drawings, “Fire from the Sky” (Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative). Vornberger, 27, edited the collection.

Children’s Museum spokesperson Debby Buckelew said that the young artists must have felt a very personal threat because the drawings and captions written by the children point out again and again that the military killed not only men, but pregnant women and children too. “They knew they (the soldiers) were not just going to kill daddies,” Buckelew said.

One caption says: “This is how our parents died.” There’s the mother prone on the floor of the house, and the father outside on his knees with his hands behind his back, a soldier’s gun to his head.

The children who had been in camp the longest showed signs of healing from the war as they began to draw more flowers and fewer green-suited men and flaming shacks, Vornberger said.

Mary Worthington, director of exhibits and programs at the Children’s Museum, said that one of the museum’s aims is to encourage kids to use different media to share events in their lives. This exhibit, as upsetting as it may be to some people, is an example of children doing just that. “The reason to do it (the show) is because it’s really happening,” said Worthington.

The children whose drawings hang at the museum are still living in the camps, in some cases with nothing over their heads but cornstalks and branches. “I don’t know what will happen to the children who drew these pictures,” Levin said, “But what’s important to me is that they get to make this testimony.”

The Los Angleles Children’s Museum has extended holiday hours--from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Christmas Eve and Christmas Day through Jan. 4. “War Through the Eyes of Children” will be on display through Dec. 31 before moving to other cities.