It's like they killed my little brother': How children experienced and drew the assassination of John F. Kennedy

"The window through which Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy remains ajar on the sixth floor of an orange building in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. It's a metaphor for how the memory of that assassination remains embedded, like a bullet, in the minds of those who were children at the time. No child was prepared to experience the shock televised on repeat and narrated by the broken voice of Walter Cronkite of that three-act drama: Kennedy's assassination before an applauding crowd,"

"For the first time we can see, in such graphic form, how some children, with chilling drawings and anguished voices, expressed the shock that the tragedy meant for them. And it's all possible thanks to the reflexes and childlike sensitivity of an independent filmmaker named Richard Snodgrass. It was he who knocked on the doors of a school at the time and asked the students to draw and describe what they had felt."

The sixth-floor window in Dealey Plaza remains ajar, symbolizing how the assassination of President John F. Kennedy stayed lodged in memories of children who witnessed it. Television replayed the event and Walter Cronkite's broken narration framed a three-act trauma: the shooting, Jack Ruby's killing of the alleged assassin, and the president's burial at Arlington. The events unfolded over four violent days in fall 1963 and plunged the nation into disarray within 75 hours. Decades later those children are elderly, and renewed political violence has reopened passions. Filmmaker Richard Snodgrass collected children's drawings and accounts to capture their shock and recollections.

Read at english.elpais.com