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Aline Pennewaard is 33 years old
and thus born far after World War 2.
Nevertheless she is searching for photos of Jewish children
who were murdered in the concentration camps.
A total of 18.000 Jewish children were murdered,
photos were found of 3000 of them.
We're at the Olympia Square in Amsterdam now,
the place where Jews were collected after being taken out of their houses in 1943.
Among these people were a lot of children.
Almost none of them returned from the camps.
Of course everybody knows Anne Frank,
but there were 18.000 children like Anne Frank.
This is the famous birthday photo of Anne,
from her 10th birthday on June 12, 1939.
Anne is second from left here.
Next to her is a friend of us, Sanne Ledermann.
And I am standing next to her.
The three of us were always together and we were called Anne, Hanne, Sanne.
We know a lot about Anne because of her diary.
But we barely know anything about Sanne.
Children take a very special place in the Holocaust,
because of their innocence and defencelessness.
Children under 16 had no chance at all to survive.
Almost all of them are killed.
Sanne was from June 20 till November 16 in Westerbork.
That night she was deported, together with her parents, to Auschwitz.
Sanne was 15 years old when she was murdered in Auschwitz.
The Nazis wanted to erase every proof that the Jews had ever existed.
With children that was even more harsh,
because in many cases they had been on this earth for a very short period of time.
Except for a name, nothing was left of them.
Adults had lived a life, they had done things, made friends, were remembered by people.
With some children that's not the case at all.
Some of them didn't get older than a few months.
If we're lucky, the only thing left of them is one photograph.
I lost a big part of my family in the Holocaust.
My father's family was almost completely wiped out.
There were also children among them.
Working on this is always very emotional for me.
I thought it was very important that this work would be done.
I wanted to keep the memories safe before this generation of survivors would pass away.
Are you Jewish? - No, I am not.
Then where did your motives come from?
I was 8 or 9 years old when I had to do a lecture at school.
I was asthmatic, so I didn't do sport and I didn't have any pets - which doesn't leave a lot of subjects.
Then my parents said: "Lecture about World War 2, that's an interesting subject."
"You should talk to grandpa about it."
This is the place where it all started for me.
Here behind me, we see the butchery of the Izaks family,
where my grandfather worked before the war.
During the war, this family was deported and murdered in Sobibor.
When I was a child, my grandfather told me about it.
It left behind a huge impression.
That's how it basically started for me.
In our town, we also have a monument for this family.
It's based on the photo that has been kept of them.
You see the empty spaces, symbolizing the family members that are not alive anymore.
The only family member left is the grandfather, who went into hiding...
...and the dog.
And for the rest it's empty.
Aline Pennewaard has been looking for 10 years for photos of Jewish children.
In high school, she read everything she could find about the Holocaust.
Then she started her photo project.
I started to search in this book.
It contains all the names of Jews from the Netherlands that were deported and killed.
I've filtered all the children younger than 18 out of this book.
18.000 names in total.
How did you do it?
Very amateuristic at first.
I had a CD with all the phone books of the Netherlands on it.
I've searched for every name that was in the book, and then a list with names and addresses came up.
I printed the list and sent these people a letter.
That's how I collected the first few hundred photos.
A memory of Eduard Hans (Edje) van Sijes
I was born there in 1936 on the third floor.
And here around the corner, in the Molenbeek Street, lived the Sijes family.
They had a baby, and I took him for a walk a few times.
That was pretty special, because I wasn't that fond of babies, but this child I really adored.
He had this beautiful big brown eyes.
He looked very, very cute.
A child like Edje is one example of all these thousands of children that were deported and murdered
before they could even have a life.
Aline found 3000 photos now.
Except for a documentary, there will be a book and an exhibition in the Amsterdam City Archives.
The most beautiful thing about these photos
is that they make you see behind the numbers.
When you have a list with 18.000 names,
that's too massive to grasp.
You can't imagine what it really depicts.
But when you see all these individual faces here on the table,
it looks less massive, and you take the children out of anonimity.
You give them their face back, one by one.
That's what we tried to do.
The documentary about this project will be broadcasted on February 12 at the Jewish Channel.