Drawings by children of Darfur

A crayon drawing by "Taha," who is 13 or 14 and lives in North Darfur, showed helicopters in the sky and houses engulfed in flames. "Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened," says the label accompanying the drawing. "We became homeless." (From the NY Times here.) And on another label there was this from 13-year-old "Salah," from West Darfur, who drew men mounting women or pointing guns at one another: "The women were screaming. They seized them, they took them by force. The pretty ones were taken away ... girls were taken, small girls, too, I think 5 and 7 and 14. Some came back after four or five hours ... Some we haven't seen again."

The 27 drawings that went on display yesterday at New York University, depict the world of the young artists, Darfur refugees who escaped the killings in Sudan. So their crayon and pencil offerings show rape, men on horseback with guns, burning villages and helicopters raining weapon fire from the sky. The exhibition, "The Smallest Witnesses: The Conflict in Darfur Through Children's Eyes," will be on display through Sept. 6 at the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University.

The work of the children, who range in age from 8 to 17, was collected in February by researchers from Human Rights Watch, an independent human rights organization. The group's goal is to focus attention on Darfur, a western Sudanese region the size of Texas. In a conflict that pits the Sudan government against rebel groups from Darfur, the United Nations estimates that as many as 200,000 have starved to death or been killed and 2.4 million have been displaced since the conflict began in February 2003. The militia, composed of Arabs known locally as "janjaweed," has hurled racial insults at the black Sudanese as it has committed the atrocities depicted by the young artists. Those atrocities have included reports of children being raped or castrated, or having their eyes gouged out. "It's extremely emotional," Sarah Sokolic, a 33-year-old actor and educator who lives on the Upper West Side said yesterday as she wandered the gallery. "Seeing the pictures really puts you there. The perspectives of children are always so true, so raw, so unedited that they draw you into their reality. It's heartbreaking."

"I feel despair," said Samuel Strauss, 25, a staff member at the Bronfman Center. "There's a sense their lives are ruined in so many ways. It'll take them years to recover from this kind of trauma." Mr. Strauss and Ms. Sokolic were among the first to see the exhibition, which will travel to Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Hamburg and Munich after New York. The art, which ranged from full renderings to stick figures, was displayed in wooden frames and usually accompanied by text explaining the drawing. All the children's names were changed to protect their privacy.

Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, manager for religious life at the Bronfman Center, said college students from New York State are to come to the center to see the exhibition and take part in discussion groups. And, he said, perhaps to get involved in political and humanitarian efforts to help Sudanese refugees. Mr. Sarna said he was particularly moved by a drawing by 15-year-old "Musa" that showed a woman running with two children, as houses burned in the background. "The meaning of the Holocaust is really brought out by this," Mr. Sarna said, referring not just to the exhibition but to the political situation in Darfur. The artwork ended up at the center through the efforts of an N.Y.U. professor in the Tisch School of the Arts, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who knew that Human Rights Watch needed gallery space, Mr. Sarna said.

The exhibition evolved almost accidentally. Human Rights Watch workers gave crayons and paper to children in seven refugee camps along Darfur's border with Chad to keep them occupied as they interviewed their parents about the ethnic violence and starvation that has engulfed hundreds of villages in Darfur, said a Human Rights Watch researcher, Dr. Annie Sparrow. "When I first started collecting them they were so shocking," Dr. Sparrow said of the drawings. "It's not just that the children are scarred and traumatized by awful atrocities but the way they're devising this unique visual vocabulary that corroborates all the testimony we've taken from adults. These are not generic guns that a 10-year-old boy would draw but guns they've actually seen," said Dr. Sparrow, who is a pediatrician. "I sat down with a weapons expert who identified what the weapons were." Dr. Sparrow also contends that the details in the drawings provide more evidence of the involvement of the Sudan government. "The government of Sudan has repeatedly denied being involved in the crisis, but the janjaweed only have guns and horse and camels," she said. "It's the government of Sudan that has the weapons of war."