Hidden Children Of The Holocaust

They hid wherever they could for as long as it took the Allies to win the war -- Jewish children, frightened, alone, often separated from their families. For months, even years, they faced the constant danger of discovery, fabricating new identities at a young age, sacrificing their childhoods to save their lives. These secret survivors have suppressed these painful memories for decades. Now, in The Hidden Children, twenty-three adult survivors share their moving wartime experiences -- some for the first time. There is Rosa, who hid in an impoverished one-room farmhouse with three others, sleeping on a clay pallet behind a stove; Renee, who posed as a Catholic and was kept in a convent by nuns who knew her secret; and Richard, who lived in a closet with his family for thirteen months. Their personal stories of belief and determination give a voice, at last, to the forgotten. Inspiring and life-affirming, The Hidden Children is an unparalleled document of witness, discovery, and the miracle of human courage.

In the terrifying summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust , these children found sanctuary with other families and schools-but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages. Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this powerfully moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent-the secrecy, the humor, the admiration, the anger, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness-all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Perhaps most riveting are the stories told by the children themselves-abruptly separated from distraught parents and given new names, the children were brought to the convents with a sense of urgency, sometimes under the cover of darkness. They were plunged into a new life, different from anything they had ever known, and expected to adapt seamlessly. Vromen shows that some adapted so well that they converted to Catholicism, at times to fit in amid the daily prayers and rituals, but often because the Church appealed to them. Vromen also examines their lives after the war, how they faced the devastating loss of parents to the Holocaust, struggled to regain their identities and sought to memorialize those who saved them.

In Nazi-occupied France in 1941, four-year-old Ruth Kapp learns that it is dangerous to use her own name. "Remember," her older cousin Jeannette warns her, "your name is Renee and you are French!" A deeply personal book, this true story recounts the chilling experiences of a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust. The Kapp family flees one home after another, helped by simple, ordinary people from the French countryside who risk their lives to protect them. Eventually the family is forced to separate, and young Ruth survives the war in an orphanage where she is not allowed to see or even mention her parents. Without the trappings of lofty language or the faceless perspective of history, this first-person account poignantly recreates the terror of war seen through the eyes of an innocent child. Your Name Is Renee is a tale of suffering and redemption, fear and hope, which is bound to stir even the most hardened heart.

The stories in Out of Chaos forms a profound testament to lost and found lives that are translated into compelling reading. The collection illuminates brief or elongated moments, fragments of memory and experience, what the great Holocaust writer Ida Fink called “a scrap of time.” In all, the anthology expresses survivors’ memories and reactions to a wide range of experiences as they survived in so many European settings, from Holland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, and France. The writers recall being on the run between different countries, escaping over mountains, hiding and even sometimes forgetting their Jewish identities in convents and rescuers’ homes and hovels, basements and attics. Some were left on their own; others found themselves embroiled in rescuer family conflicts. Some writers chose to write story clusters, each one capturing a moment or incident and often disconnected by memory or temporal and spatial divides.

Over a million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. From ten thousand to 100 thousand Jewish children were hidden with strangers and survived. In this powerful and compelling work, 25 people share their experiences as hidden children. Black-and-white photos.

The story of more than 2,000 Polish Jewish refugees who fled across the Soviet Union to Japan, where they awaited entrance visas to the United States and elsewhere.

Ten stories of children who experienced the holocaust firsthand.

A deeply moving story about a little girl hiding from the Nazis in World War II France.