Li Shir

Li Shir: Where Has My Child Gone?

The series ‘Where Has My Child Gone?’ was created during the first six months of the Gaza War, between October 2023 and March 2024, based on images sourced from contemporaneous Israeli newspapers. Beginning in the early stages of what remains, at the time of writing, an ongoing conflict, this visual war diary captures the immediacy of the traumatic events as they unfolded.

The series comprises shop-bought chess boxes and takes its title from the opening line of the song ‘Chess’ (Shachmat, שחמט) by Hanoch Levin, Israel’s renowned playwright. Written for his 1968 satirical cabaret show ‘You, Me, and the Next War,’ the song poignantly laments the casualties of war through the allegory of a chess game where “a white pawn takes a black pawn” (the Hebrew phrase is more explicit in its connection to military conflict, literally meaning ‘a white soldier strikes a black soldier’). The song culminates with the king and queen standing alone on an empty chessboard, their ambiguous colors subverting the black-and-white logic of the game to highlight the moral sacrifices and ethical uncertainties of war.

Following Levin’s allegory of chess as a losing war game, this series comprises eleven chess boxes, each flung open like a book to reveal their boards: chess on the outer surface and checkers, an Israeli favorite played in the army and on the beach, on the inner surface. All boxes were purchased during the first weeks of the war from a supermarket chain aptly named ‘Victory.’

The use of chessboards is itself an echo of another war, carrying the weight of transgenerational memory in an act of traumatic repetition. The Gaza War chessboards pay tribute to a chess box handcrafted by my grandfather, Abraham Shayer (1923–1998), complete with wooden chess pieces, which he began carving after the Holocaust while living as a Jewish-Polish refugee in the Tempelhof Displaced Persons Camp in Berlin. Although chess was common in many Jewish homes, Abraham most likely learned to play during his imprisonment in the camps. He was one of approximately 200,000 Jews who survived the war by fleeing German-occupied Poland to Soviet territories. Unfortunately, he was deported to Siberia and imprisoned within the Gulag camp system. I believe this is where he learned to play, and that the chess set he later crafted was deeply tied to his memories of the camps.

For Abraham, crafting a chess set was both an act of mourning and a testament to his survival in extremis. This rudimentary chess box, a striking example of art brut, reflects his resourceful creativity in the face of adversity and evokes the bricoleur as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It became a way to pass on lessons of resilience to future generations, embodying what Primo Levi described as “the struggle for life” in his essay ‘The Irritable Chess Players.’ Although created after the war, the chess box remains a cherished piece in our family’s private archive of Holocaust mementos and artifacts.

The selection of chessboards as a ground for contemporary war photos is rooted in the traumatic repetition of images, a phenomenon Marianne Hirsch described as postmemory. This trauma is further magnified by a haunting temporal coincidence that reveals history’s poignant ironies. The outbreak of the Gaza War on October 7, 2023, coincided with Shemini Atzeret—the final day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. By a crushing synchronicity, Shemini Atzeret also marked the liquidation of the ghetto in Abraham’s hometown, Skarżysko-Kamienna, on October 3, 1942. On that fateful day, his parents, younger brother, and extended family were deported to Treblinka, where they perished.

This connection came to light through a newly recovered photograph taken at the Tempelhof DP Camp in 1947, showing Abraham and his wife Sara holding their baby daughter—my mother—against the backdrop of a sukkah built to celebrate the holiday. For Abraham, the photo symbolized triumph, survival, and regeneration at the heart of what had once been the Nazi regime’s capital.

Within the series, this synchronicity of destruction and regeneration finds its visual counterpart in a black sukkah scratched into the surface of a chessboard using sgraffito, a technique historically employed by medieval painters to depict the wounds of Christ. As a double wound, the charred sukkah etched into the chessboard transforms into a dialectical image, as described by Walter Benjamin. It compresses opposing forces—regeneration and destruction, survival and loss, past and present—into a singular, charged moment. Such images, according to Benjamin, demand ethical engagement, urging viewers to confront the unresolved tensions and contradictions of history. Thus, the sukkah, while once representing survival and an overturning of the tragic Sukkot of 1942 in Skarżysko-Kamienna, now also marks the outbreak of a new war in the repatriated homeland.

The series’ convergence of catastrophes blurs temporal and spatial boundaries, exposing transgenerational wounds and urging reflections on homelessness, exile, and genocide. Rejecting nationalist ideologies and hierarchies of human suffering, the series draws inspiration from my grandfather’s humble, rudimentary chess box—a creation born from trauma yet transformed into an emblem of intellectual and spiritual resilience. Through repeated games of chess, my grandfather taught me that survival could be approached not as a primal, beastly struggle for life and death, but as a distinctly human and intellectual endeavour—one rooted in strategic thought, creativity, and the pursuit of peaceful resolution to conflicts. Amid the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza, and deepening chaos and despair in Israel, his chess box becomes more than a game; it stands as an ethical touchstone. His enduring legacy of humanism—centered on the value of life and the rejection of victimhood, sacrifice, and revenge—forms the ethical foundation of the series. Within this context, the chessboard transcends its function and historical significance to become a charged space where personal memory converges with collective responsibility, calling on viewers to confront cycles of violence and engage with the urgent ethical and political challenges of the present.