I hear you. There’s apparently a companion sculpture group in Toronto that represents them arriving, and is correspondingly a little more upbeat. I’m sure it must have been scary to arrive in a strange land with no clear sense of what you were going to do, but to have survived the journey must have given one some real hope.

I saw these when I was in Dublin, and along with the sculpture of the swan children, they are part of what I define as Ireland in my head. Fantastic, moving, and more than a little scary. What a way to help us wrap our supersized mentality around the absolute horror of starving. Of course, the fact that those same skeletal folks hopped on deadly ships, then made it to the US and had cool great grandkids (like me) also makes me proud of my heritage.