I quickly found that no one wanted to hear about my experience,” the Jewish scholar and author Yaffa Eliach told the New York Times just before the Gathering. She, her mother, and younger sister had hidden from the Nazis in Poland in a cave under a pigsty. Four months after the Russians reoccupied her hometown of Vilna in July 1944, Polish partisans shot her mother and younger brother, after which an uncle took Eliach to Palestine, where she discovered there was no audience at all for a hidden child’s grief.
After psychotherapist Maya Freed’s parents escaped the Warsaw ghetto when she was an infant, she was left with strangers and at orphanages. Reunited with them after the war, she didn’t complain to her parents about her nightmares of “lonely train whistles, claustrophobic rooms, loud noises, and sensations of hunger” because her own parents either dismissed her dreams when she brought them up or construed them as criticism of them, rather than frightening memories to which she couldn’t attach remembered experiences. They thought her ungrateful for all they had done to save her. When, as an adult, Freed asked her mother what she had been like, her mother told her that she was “a cute, happy child” whom everyone admired.
“Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say,” Freed wrote. “Moreover, I was ‘too young to have suffered.’ Even older hidden children assumed that I was more fortunate because I did not remember very much.” Yet even in 1991, her psychological wounds were as raw as ever. “What most people do not even notice in their daily routines can precipitate hours of anguish for me: sirens, crying babies, stray animals, even leaving the house to go to work. Every separation causes anxiety.”
“I never spoke about my experiences around my family,” Marie-Claire Rakowski wrote. “I felt they’d suffered more, and that my suffering was unimportant compared to my mother and my sister. . . . I thought there are the Holocaust survivors, and then there’s me.” Ann Shore, another of the organizers, heard it from her own husband: “Well, you’re not a Holocaust survivor. The only survivors are the ones who were in the camp.” This was the consensus, although a 2000 study of 170 Holocaust survivors by Rachel Lev-Wiesel and Marianne Amir of Ben-Gurion University concluded that survivors hidden by foster families scored significantly higher on several of the measures of distress than survivors of the camps and those who hid in the woods and/or with partisans.
A dark thread running through hidden children’s lives was the prejudice they’d experienced at the hands of older survivors, the ones who lived through the Holocaust as adults. Adult survivors had too often treated hidden child survivors as the second-class citizens of Holocaust suffering. For the vast majority of child survivors at the Gathering, it was the first time most of these child survivors felt entitled to their traumas.
Even at the Gathering itself, where everyone was on roughly equal footing, competition reared its head in other forms. At the workshop led by Flora Hogman, Sophie was shocked when Orthodox Jews attacked nonreligious ones for not living as Jews in Poland after discovering their original faith. She even apologized to them later in Polish on behalf of their Orthodox critics.
“What we have tried so hard to make others understand,” Carla Lessing still says twenty years after the Gathering, “is that there is no hierarchy of suffering. And that’s difficult because people suffered so terribly.”
It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that other people’s suffering often interferes with our own, and that we are not above manipulating our distress until we are able to see it in the worst possible light. Or to quote the British historian Max Hastings on World War II: “One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own experiences. . . . The fact that the plight of other people was worse than one’s own did little to promote personal stoicism.”
The final message of the Gathering was that instead of jockeying for moral positions as victims, the survivors had important collective work to do. At the close of the weekend, Marie-Claire Rakowski told the assembled, “As Serge Klarsfeld said, ‘You need to transcend your sorrows.’ I’d like to give you a thirty-year homework assignment. I want to ask you to tell your story to your children, your families, your friends, your synagogues. Go to schools and tell your story. Tell your story to someone and you will begin the process of healing.”
“Please, don’t go back into hiding,” said Abe Foxman, who followed her. “Out there, not in Warsaw, in Budapest, but in New York, Los Angeles, there are Jews, children, still in hiding. And that’s your responsibility, to leave this room and make sure that you’re in the open. . . . Let’s help that other thousand, two thousand, three thousand, that weren’t ready yet to be with us.”
Just as NBC’s 1978 miniseries Holocaust had made Hitler’s Final Solution safe for dinner-table conversation—one in every two Americans had tuned in to at least part of it—the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II detoxified a taboo topic for child survivors: their own experience. Holocaust, like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List fifteen years later, sparked controversy over the commercialization of the Holocaust and the rights of others to portray (and trivialize) its victims; after the release in 1985 of his nine-hour documentary Shoah, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann actually tried to dictate who should and shouldn’t be “allowed” to represent the Holocaust. The Gathering’s effect was quite different; it quietly inspired similar conferences where the forgotten victims themselves could try to reclaim the events that were being made into art and commerce all around them. The Gathering was followed a year later by a Hidden Child Congress in Amsterdam, where the opening address was given by Amsterdam’s mayor (later Dutch minister of the interior), Ed van Thijn, who himself was a hidden child who had been freed from the Westerbork transit camp in a stolen ambulance and hidden by eighteen different families.
Standing at the podium, van Thijn removed his mayoral “chain of office” and said, “I am one of you, a hidden child.” It was a powerful gesture. “As mayor, people tell me, I’m an excellent speaker, with much personal commitment, when we’re dealing with the horrors of the war . . . at the annual Auschwitz commemoration, on Yom Hashoah. . . . But to say something personal, as a hidden child, and that at this venue, is a sheer impossibility.” This conference was followed by the Second International Gathering in Jerusalem in 1993, then the First European Hidden Child Gathering in Brussels in 1995. In 1997, the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Descendants was formed, which now has fifty-four chapters (twenty-nine in the United States alone) in nineteen countries.
In an essay about Amsterdam’s Hidden Child Congress, Frederik van Gelder of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research quoted a participant on the subject of why so many child survivors now jumped at the new opportunities to meet:
What makes the difference is this: the feeling of being understood, “contained”. . . . For our kind that means: crawling into a hideout, a hole, with another victim, crying ourselves to sleep in each other’s arms. That is why our kind travel long distances to speak to people we’ve never met before. We go to these lengths to find others who share this feeling of desperation because we know that they too are chained for life to the same endless nightmares of mass graves and burnt corpses.
Could it be any wonder that the least heralded of Holocaust survivors, the hidden children, took forty-five years to find each other and attract the attention of the press? The Gathering would turn out to be part of the leading edge of a revival of Holocaust coverage—a rebirth, really, since, according to James Carroll’s study, by 1997 the rate of Holocaust stories was suddenly twice that of 1945, and greater than in any year since. The approaching millennium, or perhaps it was just the passage of a curiously requisite number of years, had enabled Americans and the press at last to confront the Holocaust.
Those two days at the Marriott made it easier for hidden child survivors, the only people to whom their experiences belonged, to reclaim their pasts. “Child survivors came out of hiding, literally, symbolically, and internally. They were no longer isolated, secret abnormal people,” Australian psychiatrist Paul Valent would write about the Gathering eight years later. “Existential meanings and purpose were difficult to extract from the Holocaust. Values, justice, trust in fellow humans and a moral Jewish God were all shaken. Yet other views could now emerge. Child survivors could take special pride in their survivorship, their own brand of courage and heroism. The little humiliated children came to defeat Hitler and the Nazi war machine. . . . The survivors could thus be a sacred bridge between the dead and the world.”
And twelve years after that, Valent was still describing it as “one of the most unusual, historically unique gatherings I’d experienced. It was like a family gathering where I could sit down and talk to anybody there and it was like talking to a family member. We talked the same language, could understand each other’s stories. We were very tolerant, resonating with each other in a way that had never happened to me before.”
Flora was overwhelmed. “I was somebody finally! I had a specialty. But it was not the specialty I wanted. I wanted to be famous for something other than the Holocaust.” At least the Gathering enabled her to feel suddenly that she was no longer a hidden hidden child, that she could finally share her knowledge, wisdom, and even her gallows humor with others.
Twenty years later, Carla still got goose pimples just thinking about it. After the Gathering, Ed and Carla got their car out of the Marriott Hotel garage and drove right into the teeth of a tremendous thunderstorm spiked with lightning bolts—a storm of biblical proportions, Ed thought, as if God himself was showing him the significance of what had just happened.
What Sophie remembered twenty years later was “crying for three days as I realized the scope of it all, with all these other professionals crying. It was only at the convention that I realized I belonged. I was overwhelmed, on top of which Newsday ran an article with a photo of me in my communion dress at the age of seven.” Colleagues of Sophie who had worked with her for years saw the photo—perhaps never has a Jewish child looked more angelically Christian—but they didn’t know the full story or what to say. It was hard for her. Like Flora, she felt pursued by the Holocaust. “I’m very empathic, but it’s very hard for me to accept kindness and sympathy.” Yet when one coworker, an American Jew, came into her office a few weeks after the Gathering to discuss the Newsday article and sat down, something happened that had not happened before the Gathering, not even with her own mother: Sophie cried.