Children against the walls. Broken childhood of the Shoah between novel, cinema and graphic novel

Abstract

The essay aims to retrace the image of childhood violated by dictatorships. It does this by working on a historical-literary-cinematographic vector filtered by a pedagogical lens that, in the sense of a pedagogy of history and narration, intends to assume the educational "precipitate" of tragic events (Gennari, 2016) to return indelible teachings. Two different and similar books - The pianist of Wladyslaw Szpilman and Maus by Art Spiegelman - are united by a terrible image; by a tragic testimony: children killed by Nazi soldiers only because they were surprised in the street, because part of a "human subset" to be eliminated with unprecedented brutality. The two authors report, through narrations entrusted to written page and illustration, the chilling practice of the suppression of small children against the walls; slammed violently to stifle tears and laments; almost macabre game; perverse gear of a wider, mechanical and terrible genocide.