It took many hidden children until the Gathering in 1991 to confront their pasts head-on. But memory, like faith itself, can be a mirage. One buries a memory, remembered in great detail, and finds, on digging it up, quite another.
Sophie, of course, had learned something about this at the age of eleven, when she found out that her conscious identity had been largely counterfeit. The discovery in 1948 that she was a Jew became a greater trauma even than the hazily recalled losses of her father and other relatives. In fact it would be another thirty years before she was able, with her mother’s help, to unearth the emotional reality of her childhood.
In the late 1970s, when Laura was taking a course on European history at Hunter College, she mentioned her wartime experiences, and her professor asked her to put her memories down on paper and present them to the class. She balked, worried that it would give her nightmares. Why revisit all of it now, when she was in her late sixties and doing fine? She had friends and grandchildren. Sophie and her husband, David, however, thought it might be good for Laura and encouraged her to write the essay. Sophie knew that the experience pressed on her mother’s consciousness, that she felt a need to talk about it. Maybe if she wrote it down, she would stop trying to engage Sophie in conversation.
So Laura sat down and handwrote twenty pages. It was a staccato montage of scenes, some only a sentence long. It was eerily free of emotion. The mentions of persecution and atrocities spoke for themselves.
Sophie and David went to hear Laura deliver her paper to her class. Afterward Sophie wondered what she had been thinking.
“First I used to throw my daughter across the ventilating shaft,” Laura addressed the class, reading from her manuscript. “I had to save my child, no matter how. . . . The Germans came three times to get me to the gas chambers, but every time I pleaded with them in German and they left. . . . It was much harder the fourth time, they insisted I come with them, then they changed their mind and asked for the child only, they said the Führer loved children, he would take good care of her.”
Sophie thought, How had she made the Germans change their minds, not once, but four times? The mother and daughter she was speaking about were them. Sophie had always regarded herself as a fatherless war orphan, not a survivor of the Holocaust. Without really being aware of it, she had put the memories away on a shelf, along with her only surviving toy from childhood, Refugee the bear.
“On my way home from work I had to walk outside the Jewish ghetto wall but there was a space through which you could see the ghetto inmates,” Laura went on. “I could never pass by without fear, though sometimes I envied them, my life was so miserable, if not for my child I would have gone in there to be done with.”
For a moment, Sophie felt as if she no longer knew her mother, just as she hadn’t really known her then, or known herself, or understood the unfathomable forces of history that had murdered 90 percent of the Jews in Poland and left them with only the smallest amount of space in which to breathe.
“I never knew what to expect, coming home from work,” her mother continued, clutching the pages in her hands. “My child started hating me, running away whenever she saw me coming. I realized one day I was on the way to becoming insane, I was driving both of us to a lunatic asylum. On that day I changed completely, I tried to regain the confidence of my child, gradually she started trusting me again.”
And all this, Sophie thought, while her mother was coping with the loss of almost everyone she had loved, and working for the Nazis.
Her mother had been the difference between having memories, however painful, and being other people’s memories, although she wondered if there would have been anyone left to remember them.
Finally, after seventeen pages, it came to an end: “I am not sure I did the right thing digging in my past,” her mother said. “There are still nights when I wake up screaming. I cannot forget the sound of German boots, it still makes me shudder. This account should be called the ‘story of a miracle.’”
In the early 1950s, after five years in Israel, Carla and Ed Lessing lived in Holland for a year and saw the van Geenens often, either at their house in Delft or at the Lessings’ near The Hague. Now that they were no longer forced together in close quarters, they became genuinely close. Mrs. van Geenen, once moody and frightened, was very loving, and Walter van Geenen was especially attentive, as was his married eldest daughter, Corrie, who took after her personable, liberal father. She didn’t seem in the least resentful that the overcrowding in the house during the war had pushed her to marry early. When Ed, now thirty, was suddenly called up by the Dutch army, Walter actually offered to hide him—again. Ed and Carla, however, used their U.S. visas to return to the New York City area, where they have lived ever since.
Every five years or so they would visit Holland and see the van Geenen family. When Walter died in the late 1960s, Carla remained close to his daughter Corrie. When Corrie died of a brain tumor, Carla stayed close to her daughter Mieke and her daughter. She now knew four generations of the family that had protected her. It was only after both the elder van Geenens were gone that any of the children expressed regrets about hiding Carla, her mother, and brother. In the late 1990s, one of the van Geenen sons, now in his sixties, spoke up to Carla, saying, We suffered too. We also had a horrible time. He was under the mistaken impression that Carla’s mother could have paid his parents more money after the war to compensate them. In fact, Carla’s mother had little—during the war, she sold off her wedding presents in order to pay the van Geenens anything at all—and was being subsidized herself by her businessman brother.
Walter neither sought nor wanted official recognition for hiding Jews during the war, but he received it posthumously in 1979 when Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust, granted him and his wife the status of Righteous Among the Nations. Today the van Geenens are among five thousand Dutch so honored, second in number only to Poland’s rescuers of Jews.
For Carla’s husband, Ed, the postwar revelations were nothing short of stunning. In 1992, he and Carla, still freshly invigorated by the Gathering in Manhattan, flew to Holland for Amsterdam’s Hidden Child Congress. In advance, Ed wrote the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation to obtain the contact information for Margrethus Oskam, the unsmiling Dutch chief of police who had saved his life during the war, and whom he hoped to see again and thank personally. Oskam had defied more than the Nazis; he came from a family of ardent Jew-hating, Nazi-sympathizing Dutch people. That fact may have allowed him to escape German suspicion, but keeping a secret of that magnitude from loved ones couldn’t have been an easy task. Moreover, Ed found out that Oskam had personally hidden thirty Jewish men, women, and children.
The Institute for War Documentation wrote back that both Oskam and his wife had died, but they were forwarding his letter to their son, Margrethus Oskam Jr., a retired plumber, who invited him to visit.
After Oskam Jr. received Ed at his home in Holland, Ed recounted the events of December 29, 1943, and his narrow escape from the German raid that claimed the lives of the other Resistance fighters. “Listen,” Ed asked him, “do you know if the men had any sisters or brothers with whom I could speak and tell them about these last moments?”
Oskam Jr. smiled. He obviously took after his mother, not his poker-faced father. “My father wasn’t a very talkative man,” he replied, “but, Mr. Lessing, there is one thing he told me that I’m sure of: none of the men in the hut were arrested that morning.”
“It can’t be!” Ed said.
“Some people came to warn them. They all escaped.”
“That was me and my friend,” Ed said, dumbfounded.
Ed’s cousin suggested that Ed go on a popular call-in radio show, Address Unknown, on the Catholic network, hosted by a Jew, Hans van Willegenburg, to see if he could reconnect with the survivors of his Resistance cell. They rushed him on the air, where he told his story about the miraculously surviving group, thinking to himself, Who the hell’s going to care about this?
At the end of the show, he was led out of the sound booth to a room where a dozen phones were ringing off the hook. Among the messages Ed was handed was one that said, “My brother was with you in the hut, but he doesn’t live in Holland anymore, but I’ll tell him. . . .” Another said: “Ed, I was with you in the hut and I live right around the corner from the radio studio. Come and see me when you’re done.”
It was almost too much to be believed. When Ed rang the doorbell of the apartment complex around the corner, a large woman he didn’t recognize buried him in an embrace.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said excitedly. “I was one of the couriers. I brought guns and newspapers, all kinds of stuff. Thank God you survived! I didn’t think you’d make it! Come, come see my husband.”
In the next room, a silver-haired man he did recognize as Louis van Tiggelen, one of the Resistance fighters from the hut, rose from his chair. They hugged and cried and reminisced, amazed again to be alive at all. Lou showed him a couple of photographs he’d taken, one a picture of Ed at seventeen in the hut with one of the others, Herman Munninghoff, and another picture of the entire group at the hut’s crude table. Ed teased Lou for taking any photos that could have been used by the Gestapo to identify them. Then Ed asked after his buddy, Jan Karman, the one who had escaped with him that day.
“I’m sorry, Ed, but Jan was arrested with two other Resistance men a couple of months later in another German raid and executed.”
“I didn’t know,” Ed murmured, bowing his head. “Oskam’s son told me everyone had escaped and I was hoping . . .”
After the Hidden Child Congress, but before he and Carla left for America, Ed mentioned to Margrethus Oskam Jr. that he’d like a splinter of wood or shard of glass from the hut as a souvenir. Oskam led Ed into the forest near the town of De Lage Vuursche toward the site of the Resistance fighters’ hut. What had been a dense undergrowth of brush and Christmas tree–shaped shrubs had become in the last half century a forest of stately, soaring pines that bore little resemblance to what Ed remembered. When Oskam stopped and said, “It was here,” Ed saw nothing at first. The hut was long gone. The only clue that this was the location of the hut that had been their home, and where Ed and the others had once risked their lives, was a slight depression in the ground, where they had buried their cache of stolen weapons and uniforms.
That December Ed was flown back to Holland to tape a television show, also hosted by van Willegenburg, to be aired on Christmas Day. With the Oskam family and his own cousins in the audience, Ed recounted everything for the host: the hiding, the hut, the raid, the escape, his mother finding them on a bicycle, which she then gave to Jan Karman, who didn’t make it, and how Ed had just visited his grave the day before.
“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lessing,” the host said. “We’ve got part of a diary from your buddy, in which he describes the whole thing and how it was.”
But that’s impossible, Ed thought to himself. He was executed seven weeks after the raid. There’s no way he could have written a diary. Ed didn’t want to be a difficult guest, though, so all he said was, “That’s very interesting.”
“Mr. Lessing,” the host went on, “I want you to know that your friend is here to talk to you.”
As chills traveled the length of Ed’s spine, a door to the studio opened and out walked a tall man, who took Ed’s hand and said, “Thank God you’re alive, Ed. I’m Herman Munninghoff.” Ed was in shock. “Ed, you convinced Lou van Tiggelen that you were with Karman, but it was me—not Jan. Your mother gave me her bike and saved my life.”
“Oh, my God!” Ed said, hugging Herman. “It was so long ago,” he added, by way of excusing his confusion.
“After I took the bicycle, I wasn’t more than a mile away when I was stopped by a German. He made me get off the bike and face a little pump house and spread my arms and legs, and then he frisked me for weapons. Thank God your mother made us bury them! I knew German,” Herman continued, “and I went on the offensive a bit because I could tell what the German wanted. So I said, ‘What the heck are you doing?! I’m coming from night school and my mom is holding dinner for me. What do you want? Do you want this bicycle? Do you want the flashlight? Here, take it! Just let me keep the bicycle so I can get home to my mother.’ And he asked me what I was studying and I told him I was studying to be a notary public, which was true, if you remember, Ed. And then he let me pass and I pedaled away from my third brush with death that day.”
After the taping, Ed asked Herman where the hell he had come from to be on the show.
“New Guinea, Indonesia,” Herman said. “The producers called me, and when I told them I was headed here for medical reasons, anyway, they arranged this little surprise.”
“Wait, Herman. What do you do in New Guinea to make a living?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a living, Ed.”
“What do you do there?”
“I became a Catholic bishop, Ed. I’m a Franciscan bishop and we build hospitals there for the natives.”
Ed shook his head at how this man, whom he had long thought dead, who had come so close to death at the hands of the Nazis, had in fact survived and grown up to save lives in Indonesia, and he thought of all the other lives, millions of them, that would have been saved by the blameless Catholics and Jews who had not made it out of the Holocaust alive.
It was only well after the war that Flora began to see her childhood for what it was: a miserable drama played out with millions of others as part of a tragedy whose scope neither she nor the world would ever be able to comprehend. Yet Flora didn’t know the entire truth even of her own drama. What of her memories of life at the convent? In the 1960s, she returned there, looking for answers, where she was confronted by a middle-age nun behind the same black iron grille.
“I was hidden here during the war,” Flora said. “I wanted to thank you for saving my life.”
“I was here, but I wasn’t one of those involved with the children,” the nun replied. “The ones who looked after you”—she rattled off a list of sisters—“I’m sorry to say that they’ve all died.”
It felt like a rebuke to Flora for not having come sooner, on top of which the nun proceeded to lecture Flora, at that point a confirmed atheist, about the importance of religion.
“You don’t have to be a Catholic, you know, but you must be something.”
Flora returned to New York unsatisfied, but twenty years later, in the 1980s, a French friend, Ann, wrote Flora to say that, no, one of the nuns was still alive, the one who had been in charge of the children’s chorus back in 1943. She was retired to a cottage next to the convent. But how, Flora wondered, could the nun she’d seen in the 1960s not have been aware of her? Ann volunteered to visit the surviving nun on Flora’s behalf, and her subsequent letter to Flora proved how unreliable her memories had been. The old nun had been kind, Ann wrote, and said that she and others had tried so hard to reassure the children, urging them to play. The nun had, of course, understood the children’s need for affection; she herself had lost her mother at a young age. Yes, they had taught the Jewish children how to make the sign of the cross, but she emphasized only because of the Germans living across the street.
Flora could barely reconcile this information with her own scrapbook of grim memories at the convent. Surely they had resented the children. Surely they had resented the interruption of their life of silent devotion. She couldn’t possibly have hallucinated the nuns pacing and praying on the roof, their eyes heavenward. Flora couldn’t have invented her desperate wish that they look at her just once.
The old nun had passed on the address of a Jewish woman named Lucy, who she said had taken care of the Jewish children because at the time she, just thirteen, was the oldest of them. In 1988 Flora flew to France to meet Lucy, now the owner of a bookstore in Paris. After greetings and hugs, Lucy launched into a jaundiced, detailed account of life at the convent that at times approached a tirade. “Yes,” said Lucy, “they were constantly on the roof, praying. I had the responsibility of calming the children down! You were always so scared. But I never had anyone to talk to! No one to calm me down. I tried to get the nuns to look at me, but, you know, it was a sin for them to look at mere mortals! It was a worldly vanity to look at other humans! When there was a problem with one of you, I had to communicate with them through an intercom in the dining room! They never came over from their side of the wall. God forbid they should look at me when I spoke! I had to do everything—the wash, take care of the sacristy, the chapel, teach you the lives of the saints to keep you occupied. Oh, the nuns, they were too busy praying to help out! The only reason they took us in was because the archbishop ordered them to.
“But you know something?” Lucy said. “Despite it all, I’ve visited them every year since the end of the war. I suppose it’s because they did save our lives. I mean, they were the closest things to parents in my life. My own didn’t make it out of the camps.”
Lucy showed Flora an old black-and-white photo of four girls on the steps of the little house that served as their dormitory.
“Am I one of them?” Flora asked her.
“No idea. So many children came through the convent on their way to other hiding places.”
Later in her trip, when Flora drove to the convent in Nice, for the first time in twenty years, in her anxiety she turned into the wrong driveway, the one to the private mansion across the street. She explained her business to the guard, who indicated the convent in plain view across the way, adding that, yes, the Germans had occupied the mansion during the war. So close, Flora thought; how could she blame the nuns for keeping their distance from their Jewish charges?
Once in the courtyard with its terraced hill, Flora recognized nothing at first but the eerie silence of the place. What she remembered as an orderly garden was now running amok, and a middle-aged woman in street clothes was trying to weed the chaotic bed. To Flora she explained that she liked to help the nuns tend the garden because, as a Christian child, she often came here after rationing during the war because the sisters gave out extra food. That’s why, she continued, the Jewish children could come and go without being conspicuous. The Germans across the street were used to seeing the little ones. Still, Flora shuddered at the thought of her daily proximity to death. And the night she and the others were herded into the covered truck and driven to safety? How could the Nazis right across the street not have noticed, not have been suspicious?
As Flora looked up the hill to the house, still surrounded by the hedge of roses, the woman said, “You should go see the Mother Superior. She was here.”
“But I’ve been told they were all dead except for one, who was in retirement.”
“You were misinformed,” the woman said, pointing across the courtyard. “That’s the door.”
Flora approached the entrance to the convent, wondering if she was about to meet her past in the flesh. She rang the bell and the door opened, as if expecting her. Before her was a row of vertical iron bars that separated the far third of the room from where she stood. Standing behind the bars was a tall figure in heavy robes.
This nun, the Mother Superior, smiled at her as she opened the gate in the iron grille and came toward her.
“You were here during the war?” she asked.
“Oui, Mère Supérieure. My name was Flora Hillel, but here I was Marie Hamon. And now I’m—”
“I know you,” the Mother Superior said. Her mouth widened in a bigger smile. “I prayed for you. I prayed for you so much!” She clasped her hands, as if Flora were proof of God’s existence, the most perfect vindication of her faith.
Flora’s tears flowed down her face as she thought of her mother—it was, she realized, the first time she had been able to cry about her—and she could barely get out the words, “Merci. Je vous remercie mille fois pour m’avoir sauvé la vie.”
Flora reached out her hand, but the nun dodged it and swept in to embrace her, murmuring, “I prayed for you, Flora. I prayed for you so much. You had such an original name when you came. Flora,” she repeated it. “I never saw you because we were not allowed to look at you, but I heard you. We listened to you from the roof.”
It was true, then, that the nuns weren’t allowed to look at them. But it was also true that they prayed for them on the roof. Unlike the last nun Flora had met here, the Mother Superior didn’t lecture her about religion. Instead, unbidden, she started apologizing for prejudice—not the persecution and murder of the Jews by the Nazis, but the denigration of the Jews by the Catholic church. “We didn’t know any better,” she said. “We were taught we were better than other religions.” She straightened to her full height in front of Flora. “We didn’t know it was prejudice. We just thought we were better. It was very destructive. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive us.”
Of course I’ll forgive them, Flora thought. They saved my life. “We were so scared,” the Mother Superior blurted out, tears on her cheeks. “We were frightened every day. The Germans were so close, across the street. Their boots stomping all the time, their loud voices interrupting our silence every night. We all lived on the edge of death. We all could so easily have been killed. I wish more of you would come back.”
Flora promised to return.
“But don’t go yet. There is someone else you must meet.” She mentioned a nun whose name Flora didn’t recognize. “She was a soeur courière,” the Mother Superior said. “She hadn’t taken a vow of silence and was entrusted with worldly chores, mostly making sure you children had enough to eat.”
She led Flora by the arm to the door to the courtyard and gestured toward a frail old woman in a wheelchair in the garden, wearing a hat against the Mediterranean sun and dragging a hose as she propelled her chair along a path from one dry flower bed to the other. She watered each bed with a thin stream. A gray cat, leashed to the wheelchair’s arm, had no choice but to follow her.
Flora introduced herself. Emboldened by her reception so far, she leaned down to hug the nun. Flora’s touch was like a jolt of energy to the old woman, who suddenly became agitated. She began gesticulating wildly even as she continued to roll on to the next sunflower.
“There was so little to eat!” she exclaimed. “Every day I took my bicycle up and down the hill, looking for food in every store. I had to beg shopkeepers, these merdouilles!”
Flora winced at the profanity—“shitheads”—but in old age the nun obviously felt entitled to her obscenities.
“They didn’t care! They wouldn’t give me any extra milk, any extra bread, and with us having more and more children to feed here every day! Once I found a lousy piece of chocolate, but, oh, did I have to fight for it! I wasn’t going to leave without it! And that Jewish couple we hid? They were so rich, but they wouldn’t part with their black market food coupons! The merdouilles! I threatened to denounce them, but no—they wouldn’t hear of it. Merdouilles!”
It would have been like a scene from a comedy if it weren’t for the tragedy she was still railing about forty-five years later. Flora was freshly appalled by the realities she knew nothing about, but the nun’s outburst appealed to her own irreverent nature.
“Let me tell you,” the nun went on, “everyone is equal under God! Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she shook the hose with each word, sending undulating arcs of water into the flower beds—“and intolerance is responsible for all the violence! It’s drilled into children from the beginning.”
Flora walked behind her, smiling. The world had clicked one notch further into place. She was so glad to have reconnected with this chapter of her dark childhood. She had the most extraordinary feeling that her mother was near, closer than she could remember in years.
The memory of parting from her mother turned out to be flawed as well. It wasn’t her mother who had taken her to the convent at the beginning of 1943. It couldn’t have been her mother who took her there, since the parents would not have been allowed to know where their children were going, so that they could not give them up under interrogation or torture. Her rescue had actually been the work of one of the most successful Resistance operations of the war, the brainchild of Moussa Abadi. Abadi was a Syrian-born Jewish actor and political activist who earned a degree from the Sorbonne in child psychology, lost his scholarship due to anti-Semitism in 1936, then joined a French theater company, which toured America. After the company dissolved in 1938, he remained in Paris until the summer of 1940, when he set out for Nice by bicycle, where he was joined by his companion, a doctor named Odette Rosenstock. By 1942 they were working with an organization helping Jewish refugees who, like Flora and her mother, had sought a haven in Nice.
At the beginning of 1943, Abadi encountered a man who would change his life and that of hundreds of Jewish children. An Italian chaplain passing through Nice from the Eastern Front of the war told Abadi of Nazi atrocities there. Although the Einsatzgruppen and many of the death camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Janowska in Lvov—had been in operation for more than a year, the world had heard little of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews and believed even less. When Abadi refused to accept the stories, including the chaplain’s reports of atrocities against children, the chaplain laid his crucifix in his palm and swore by Jesus Christ that it was all true. Based on this, as well as the persecution and deportation of Jews they had already witnessed, Abadi and Rosenstock committed themselves to saving Jewish children in Nice.
At the time, Abadi’s cover was working for the bishop of Nice, Monsignor Paul Remond, as an elocution teacher for his seminarians. After Abadi presented his plan to save Jewish children to Remond, the bishop replied that saving children was at the core of his being. Together, they set up a network they called Reseau Marcel. Remond gave Abadi, who dressed as a priest, the improvised title of superintendent of Catholic education, an office, and a signed letter giving him access to Christian institutions in the area. Odette Rosenstock became known as Sylvie Delattre, a social worker in charge of refugee children in the diocese. On the strength of this single document, and the courage of Abadi, Rosenstock, Monsignor Remond, and many others, the lives of 527 Jewish children were about to be saved.
When she learned this, Flora’s memory of her mother taking her to the convent was replaced by a vague recollection of her mother leaving her on a train platform with a man in a cape, a man who must have been Abadi himself, a hero who survived the war, married Odette Rosenstock, and became for many years a dramatic arts critic on French radio. He lived well into his eighties, but refused until almost the end of his life to discuss his work during the war.
Yet, even after all this, Flora continued to be surprised by her emotions. In the 1990s, she volunteered for an organization called Facing History and Ourselves, which since 1976 had been devoted to teaching teenage students about racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudice. Facing History and Ourselves often sent genocide survivors into classrooms to teach children how “to combat prejudice with compassion, indifference with participation, and myth and misinformation with knowledge.”
Facing History sent Flora one afternoon to talk to junior high school students in Manhattan. On the way there, she figured it would be interesting for them to hear the story of how her friend Rachel had raised her hand when their second grade teacher in Nice had asked which students were Jewish. So Flora started to tell them, getting as far as the part where Rachel raised her hand and she didn’t, and suddenly she choked up. The tears began to stream down her cheeks, and she couldn’t go on. In that moment, Flora realized that she had never talked about Rachel before. For the first time in her life, that moment became real—certainly more real than when it had actually happened and the consequences of Rachel’s and her different actions couldn’t be known. It seemed to her that, merely to survive her childhood, Flora’s psyche had had to put the terror of her narrow escape from deportation in a box and not open it again. Taken completely off guard, she began to weep right there, standing in front of twenty-five preadolescents, children who sat, silent, while Flora tried vainly to compose herself.
For many minutes, she cried, unable to collect herself enough to say one more thing. And yet in those twenty minutes she felt that some totally anesthetized piece of her childhood, the part that had sent one girl to her death and her to a kind of living purgatory from which she had still not escaped, had now regained its feeling. And she felt grateful that these children had freed her.
At the end of her crying, during which the students had barely moved, she wanted to continue the story, but just the thought of it brought new tears to her eyes. She looked out at the faces of the students who hadn’t said a word, and knew that there was no need for her to go on talking. She knew that the students already understood what had happened to Rachel beyond what any of her words could have conveyed. The children could see well enough what had happened to her, little Flora Hillel, a child survivor of the Holocaust who had grown up to be a psychologist studying child survivors of the Holocaust, but who had still not fully come to terms with the catastrophe that, to these children, was now much closer and far more real than just another piece of obligatory middle-school ancient history.