Next month David and some 500 survivors will have the chance to tell their stories at the first conference on “The Hidden Child.” The meeting, to be held in New York, is intended to “begin the healing process and also give our children and grandchildren a testimony of what we went through,” says David. The story of the hidden children may be one of the last unwritten chapters of the history of the Holocaust. According to Deborah Dwork, a Yale social historian and author of “Children With A Star,” perhaps 200,000 Jewish children were hidden at some point during the war; of those, probably no more than half survived. But for many years there was a sense even within the Jewish community that those who got through the war without being in a concentration camp were somehow not “real” survivors. The most famous hidden child of all, Anne Frank, owes at least some of her fame to the fact that she did not survive. Dwork strongly rejects the tendency to minimize the difficulties of the hiding experience. “These experiences should not be compared to what was worse,” she says. “They should be compared to the way it should have been.”
Psychologists agree that hiding was often traumatic, especially since most children were separated from their parents and families. “The experience of being sent into hiding is essentially an experience of abandonment,” says Sarah Moskowitz, a psychologist at California State University, Northridge, who has studied child survivors of the Holocaust.
Most hidden children were encouraged to forget about their wartime experiences. “I’d been told, ‘You were only a child, you don’t remember, you didn’t suffer’,” says Daisy Miller, a Los Angeles retirement consultant who hid in Italy. Clearly, though, many child survivors did suffer. Dasha Werdygier-Rittenberg, a Polish-born New Yorker who experienced life in hiding as well as in the concentration camps, found that the former experience held its own set of terrors. “The fear of being caught was worse for me than already being a victim,” says Werdygier-Rittenberg. Even today she can still become upset when she describes the crowded, dark cellar in Poland where a mother accidentally suffocated her baby as she tried to stifle the screams which would have given away the hiding place.
Some of the reluctance to speak came from the survivors themselves. “After the war, we had to start living again,” says David. For those who left Europe, “there was a great need and wish to be part of a newly adopted country,” says Yaffa Eliach, a professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College. Eliach is a case in point. After spending the war years hiding in Poland she immigrated to Israel, where she was once chosen to represent her school as “a perfect Israeli child, born under free blue skies,” she says. “Little did they know that my education was in a cave under a pigsty which never saw sun or light.”
The task of building a new life and raising families kept the issue at bay for many years. In most cases, families did not want to talk about the past. “If I mentioned it to my ex-husband, he’d say, ‘Oh, Mia, not again’,” says Mia Fendler-Immerman, a Belgian-born artist who lives in New York. But as the hidden children enter their 50s, their parents are dying and their children are leaving home. “As older survivors are dying, hidden children are beginning to mourn their lost past,” says Eva Fogelman, a New York therapist who has worked with children of survivors as well as hidden children. “With the process of mourning comes a sense and a need to do something.”
Psychologists who have studied Holocaust survivors are reluctant to generalize about a group whose experiences are so diverse. But one important task they share is the burden of dealing with a lost childhood, says Fogelman. “These individuals had to grow up overnight,” she says. “Many of them were robbed of the opportunity to have fun. As adults they always missed that part of never having been a child.”
When they do begin to talk about their experiences, survivors find the process liberating. “It’s wonderful to find others out there with similar feelings,” says Miller. “Our experiences are different, but the quality we bring is the same. It’s an intimacy that is there for us.” As the beneficiaries of precious acts of kindness and bravery on the part of their protectors, many of the survivors have a strikingly upbeat perspective. “Living beyond the Holocaust is a triumphant experience and generates an acute appreciation of life,” says Shoshana Ron, a Belgian-born artist who now lives on Long Island. “I have an unwavering belief in the individual and his ability to transform the world.”
