Such Good Girls (19 page)

Carla Lessing wasn’t in the habit of speaking out, but during the question-and-answer period she summoned the courage to raise her hand and ask Kestenberg, “Have you done any research on children who survived in hiding?”

The answer was a polite no.

After the talk, however, Lessing was approached by another audience member named Nicole David, a Belgian who had been hidden in an orphanage, with a wealthy Catholic family, and finally in a convent during the war. She was now part of a survivors’ group that Dr. Kestenberg had started. Some of that group’s members, former hidden children, were thinking of organizing a conference devoted to these largely ignored members of the Holocaust survivors population. Would Lessing like to be part of it? After all, there had already been official Holocaust adult survivor events and conferences around the world since the 1960s. There had been conferences for children of survivors in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Israel. Just eight years before, in 1981, 10,000 survivors and their descendants had gathered in Jerusalem.

At that gathering in Jerusalem in 1981, another former hidden child survivor and now Canadian psychiatrist Robert Krell had had the same idea as Nicole David and now Carla Lessing and others. Krell listened as Rabbi Israel Meir Lau said, “I am the youngest survivor of Buchenwald. My father, the Rabbi of Piotrowsk, died in Treblinka, my mother in Ravensbrück. I was eight years old at Liberation.” At that moment Krell realized that the child survivors “were genocidal war’s leftovers.” Older survivors were scared of the children of the Shoah; they had their hands full dealing with their own damage. A couple of years later, Krell tried to organize a group of child survivors in Los Angeles, hoping to get something started; similar groups were stirring in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal. In 1988 there was a small gathering of hidden children survivors at a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, motel owned by a survivor, but none of the efforts got much traction. It was as if the children of the Holocaust—especially the former hidden ones—were still waiting for their Moses to lead them out of their silent enslavement.

One other person in the group Nicole David mentioned to Carla had impressive credentials, even though she had been born just after the war. However, Myriam Abramowicz had a personal stake in the matter. Although she was born after the war, her own parents had survived the war in hiding with one family in Brussels, while her older brother had been whisked out of the hospital at birth to hide with another.

Unlike most hidden survivors, her parents didn’t protect their children from the Holocaust. Myriam was seven when she learned the truth, which set her on a course to help change the destinies of thousands of hidden child survivors. When the daughter of the local butcher in Brussels called her “a dirty Jew” in 1953, she pushed the girl against a wall and ran home. She showed her father her well-washed hands and said, “See, I’m not dirty.” Soon after, her father called his two children into his study and told them of his own brother and sister, and her two children, who had been gassed.

In 1955, Myriam and her family traveled to America on the Queen Mary and settled first in Brooklyn. In a closet, her mother kept bags of photos, pictures taken before and after the war, nourishing Myriam’s curiosity about her family and the historical gap for which no photos existed. Later, when Myriam read Anne Frank’s diary and learned that they shared a birthday, June 12, the thought entered Myriam’s head that maybe she had been put on earth to finish the work Anne had begun. She came by her interest in storytelling honestly; she was the great-grandniece of S. Y. Abramowicz—aka Mendele Mocher Seforim, considered by many the grandfather of Yiddish literature.

As an adult, Myriam began attending Holocaust survivor conferences, noticing that the hidden children there were actually told to keep quiet by their elders. The children were on no one’s radar screen, not even the other survivors’. In 1977, when Myriam was thirty-one, she visited Belgium and met her mother and father’s savior, without whom Myriam would not have existed. On her return to New York City, she took a leave from her publishing job as assistant to André Schiffrin, editor in chief at Pantheon Books, and, inspired by Studs Terkel, whose books Schiffrin edited, she returned to Belgium to interview other non-Jewish hiding parents for a book she wanted to write.

However a book seemed inadequate for capturing her subjects’ emotions, and she decided in 1978 to make a documentary instead with a French potter-turned-filmmaker named Esther Hoffenberg, whose father had hidden in Poland. Released in 1980, As If It Were Yesterday documented the extraordinary Belgians who had hidden and placed over four thousand Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. The title came from several interviewees’ response to her asking how well they remembered the day long ago when they brought a Jewish child into their home. The term “hidden child” was used for the first time in the documentary, lending a name at last to a forgotten population and an overlooked problem.

As If It Were Yesterday won awards and played around the world to audiences that included many hidden children, some of whom left their names and addresses in Myriam’s journal after the screenings. When she had collected a couple hundred names, her mother suggested that Myriam should invite them all into her apartment on 108th Street and Broadway in New York City. When Myriam proposed this at a survivors meeting in 1989, Dr. Judith Kestenberg and Dr. Eva Fogelman countered with a bigger idea. Fogelman, a New York psychologist specializing in Holocaust survivors and the writer/producer herself of an award-winning documentary about the children of survivors, had been instrumental ten years earlier in organizing the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors at Hebrew Union College in New York City. She was also a founding member of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors that followed.

“Wait,” Fogelman said. “Wait a year, and let’s do it right.”

Kestenberg’s husband, who was in real estate, loaned the group an office, and what Myriam’s mother had conceived as an informal coffee klatch in her apartment was on its way to becoming the three-day First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II.

The informal group didn’t need to look beyond its members to see the damage that had been done to hidden children since the war. No one embodied as many traumas and tragic ironies of the hidden child survivor as another woman in the group, named Marie-Claire Rakowski. When Marie-Claire was born in Belgium in 1943, her mother placed her with a childless Catholic couple named Hicket, whom she would learn to love dearly. In 1945, unknown to Marie-Claire, her mother, who had survived Auschwitz in terrible health, tried unsuccessfully to reclaim her from her devoted hiding parents. Two years later, her mother authorized a Jewish organization to kidnap her daughter and transport her to Switzerland, where she was reunited with her older sister, who had spent the war years in a convent.

“The first thing she did when she met me,” Marie-Claire said in an interview years later, “was to grab the doll I’d brought and rip it apart. From then on she took every possible opportunity to make me miserable.” The two sisters were sent to a succession of foster homes—a small tragedy, given the love Marie-Claire felt for the Hickets. There, Marie-Claire’s “mentally disturbed” sister continued to torment her, even physically beating her. When their mother finally showed up to visit, Marie-Claire said, “I refused to believe that this flabby, unattractive person who kept pawing me was my real mother. I felt disgusted.” After two years of foster homes, the girls were sent to the United States without their mother and placed in a Hasidic family that changed her name to Miriam and subjected her to the completely unfamiliar rigors of Orthodox law. They then landed in the homes of one rabbi, then another, the second of which sexually abused Marie-Claire. “That,” she said, “was when I finally felt the full impact of what had happened to me: I had lost my hiding parents (the only people I could ever think of as my real parents).”

While at Jewish summer camp when she was ten, her mother reappeared. The whole camp celebrated her arrival with a party, singing Hebrew songs, while Marie-Claire felt it was too late for her mother to be of any help. Nonetheless, she and her sister moved in with their mother in Brooklyn, who exhibited many of the behaviors common to survivors. “She wouldn’t even buy toilet paper or sanitary napkins. If any food spoiled, she ate it and expected us to do the same. There was no such thing as throwing out even a blackened, wet lettuce leaf. We were three sick people, living together.” When Marie-Claire was sixteen, her mother raised a frying pan against her, to which she responded by picking up a knife. Her mother called the police, who contacted the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, which placed Marie-Claire in a group home, where she was isolated again, this time as a “religious Jewish girl” thrown among juvenile delinquents.

“While I was hanging out with drug addicts and around drugs constantly, I never touched the stuff. What protected me was the solid foundation of love that I’d had up to the age of four. That was something I was able to hold on to in a private place.” She managed to finish high school, then worked as a bookkeeper, benefited from psychotherapy, and reconciled with her mother, whom she took care of until her death in 1970. With the sister, there was no further communication.

In her forties, Rakowski summed herself up as “relatively healthy, compared with a lot of other people… . But if you look at my history, I should be crazy! I should have killed myself at twenty-one. But I’m beyond that, which says a lot about the human spirit and a person’s recuperative powers.”

Carla jumped at the chance to be part of the planning for a conference, in charge of forty workshops conducted in three different languages. She realized that it would take time to reach as many members as possible of a group that, by its very nature, had not been in touch since the war—had not, with a few exceptions, even known of each other’s existence. With just a handful of names in hand, the planning committee placed announcements in two Jewish publications.

Carla dedicated herself to the conference, devoting virtually all her free time to it for a year. At last, she felt part of a community. She could share the experiences she had always held tightly within herself. She didn’t have to worry now; the whole purpose of their project was to create the safest and most meaningful context in which to share the stories and the grief. Calls from a few ambivalent former hidden children trickled in, and each caller needed help in making up his or her mind. It was slow going.

Then, in early 1991, New York magazine published an article about the coming conference, and the group started to hear from former hidden children everywhere. Most still needed encouragement and reassurance. Even artist Ann Shore, one of the planners, had her doubts about coming forward. However, the article had featured a large photo of her, and she couldn’t back out now. A stranger even came up to her in a parking lot, touched her arm, and said, “I’m glad you’re here.” Artists she’d known for decades were astonished to learn of her past. Shore considered registering under a false name, as if an alias would protect her from the powerful emotions she suspected would be released by the event.

Hidden children had, in effect, continued to hide, and be hidden, since the war. They didn’t even have a name for themselves. Although Myriam Abramowicz had used the term “hidden child” years before, it had hardly caught on; instead, it was “the Jewish children and babies who had been hidden during the war.” For most of these survivors, the sources of family stories and intergenerational conversations—a cornerstone of the foundation of an individual’s identity—had been exterminated. Even if relatives survived, the family narrative had been badly broken. What often remained were unspeakable memories, shame, and helplessness, which constituted a lingering atrocity. The Nazis had not only stolen their families but their pasts as well.

In a little-known documentary called Hidden Children, a Hungarian Jewish writer, therapist, and father of five who hid in Budapest in plain sight during the war would express it most wrenchingly:

“I know I can’t be a Jew the way one has to be according to Jewish custom, tradition, law,” a tearful André Stein tells the filmmaker, “but on the other hand I can’t be whole without embracing who I was meant to be… . It’s a loneliness with two poles and I just shuttle between the two… . I’m passing this on to my children… . That’s the saddest, is that [the Nazis] got to my kids through me.”

As the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II loomed just a few months away, the influential Anti-Defamation League brought the fledgling group under its wing, spurred by ADL’s national director Abraham Foxman. Foxman himself had been a hidden child whose parents left him with his Christian nanny in Lithuania before they fled to escape the Nazis. He was all too familiar with the plight of hidden children even after the war; when Foxman’s parents came to claim their son, his nanny refused to give him up, and it took a kidnapping and several painful lawsuits before he was reunited with his biological parents.

With their new ADL affiliation, the organizers forged ahead. But how did you convince people to come out of hiding when hiding was all they had known? Carla and the rest of the group now thought they would be lucky to draw a few hundred former hidden children to the conference at the end of May.

But, incredibly, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, more than 1,600 middle-aged men and women from twenty-eight countries filtered into the ballroom on the seventh floor of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. They were glad to be out of the unseasonable ninety-degree heat, even if almost all of them were anxious about what awaited them inside. With few exceptions, they were strangers to one another, their fellow travelers from an old journey through darkness and terror. But it could also be said that they were strangers to themselves, and had traveled from near and far to learn more about who they were.