WHITE HEATH - Carrie Burns is a strong advocate of positive relations between Christians and Jews.

In an effort to express her feelings toward Jews and the Holocaust, Burns has discovered a hidden talent. She is creating a series of collages dedicated to the memory of children killed or imprisoned by the Nazis.

Burns, who plans to serve this fall as a volunteer at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, is creating the collages from items such as replicas of the "Jude" patch worn by Jews under Nazi rule, scraps of sheet music, antique handmade lace and Bible verses. A picture of a child is the centerpiece of each collage.

After an acquaintance who works at Yad Vashem offered to purchase her first collage, Burns is considering selling her artwork to raise funds for the museum. Yad Vashem, the world's largest Holocaust museum, is often in the news. It is a mandatory stop when foreign dignitaries visit Israel. President George Bush and Sen. Barack Obama have both toured the facility.

Burns, creative director of WGNN, a Christian radio station, has befriended many Jewish people while taking Hebrew lessons at a Champaign synagogue and leading tours of Israel with her husband, Mark, the station's general manager.

Burns, who has read extensively about the systematic massacre of millions of innocents, believes studying the Holocaust is important. She said it is a way to recognize evil to "settle within your heart now as to where you will take your stand when faced with it, no matter what the cost."

While many of the stories on the Holocaust pack an emotional wallop, Burns was especially moved when she read a book a friend gave her, "Children at Play in the Holocaust."

A passage that grabbed her attention was a conversation between a 9-year-old girl and her father, while crammed into a cattle car en route to the Majdanek concentration camp.

The girl asked: Will there be schools and playgrounds there, Daddy? Her father assured her everything she wanted would be there.

"I had to pray throughout reading it," Burns said. The descriptions of how children were able to dispel fear and despair in camps by playing games inspired Burns to begin work on her first collage. Her method was suggested by an article in a craft magazine on a quilter, who fashions tiny quilts and attaches them to antique postcards.

For Burns, who uses the laundry room next to the WGNN studio as her workshop, this was the perfect medium to express her feelings about the senseless brutality she has struggled to understand.

"I get to express my real heart," Burns said. "I've never expressed anything like this. I didn't know how to do this."

Her first collage includes the haunting image of a wide-eyed young Polish Jewess, taken in a Warsaw classroom shortly before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, where the Nazis killed 3 million Jews.

Burns added a page from Israel's national anthem, "Hatikva" (The Hope), a scripture from Isaiah, "Comfort my people, says your God," and a tiny, 55-piece quilt.

After completing her first collage, Burns sent a photograph of it to Susanna Kokkonen, director of the Christian Friends desk at Yad Vashem. That desk was recently added at the museum, partly because of the high percentage of Christian visitors.

When Kokkonen saw the picture of the collage, she offered to purchase it from Burns. In an interview by e-mail, Kokkonen said that Burns has a great love for Israel and a willingness to learn more about its people and history.

"I think her pieces of art reflect a beautiful inner world of hers, where she understands the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and the fact that its trauma continues till today," Kokkonen wrote. "This is very important, as there are many things about the modern state of Israel that we understand deeper through the trauma of the Holocaust. I also think that her works show an understanding of the individual and individual suffering, as it reflects and illuminates the suffering of the people as whole.

"I think it is especially touching that a Christian creates these kinds of pieces that are so deep and in them have the quality of almost what you would call modern Judaica items."

Judaica is a general term for objects of Jewish culture.

Burns, who plans to teach on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in U.S. churches after serving as a Yad Vashem volunteer, believes she is receiving divine help in her artwork.

"I feel like I need to keep making these, but I don't know why," Burns said.

hfreeman@herald-review.com|421-6985