Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay.

  On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program.

  “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.”

  It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent.

  Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.

  Now, almost thirty-eight years to the day after Kohner’s appearance, child survivors—the hidden ones—were in the spotlight at last, but far more important, they were visible to one another.

  Myriam Abramowicz, one of the Gathering’s godmothers, watched as attendees approached the large rolling bulletin board on which survivors had posted photographs from the war years. A photo of seven-year-old Sophie in her communion dress was among them. Despite a sign warning survivors to post copies, a lot of them were precious originals. Two survivors, one a few years older than the other, stood at the wall, arm in arm, studying a photograph of a group of girls.

  “I remember you liked tomatoes,” the older one said to the other.

  Tears sprang into the younger one’s eyes.

  Myriam walked over and asked about the photo.

  “We were both in the same home,” the older one explained. “I was twelve and she was seven. She liked tomatoes so much she would trade anything for them in the dining hall.”

  “I’m crying,” the younger one said, “because until this moment I really couldn’t remember anything. I had no one to tell me how I was as a child. I have no idea who I was then. My parents never came back, and the whole time has been a blank. But the tomatoes—I can see myself now.”

  Unexpected reunions and connections were the norm. A member of the contingent that had come all the way from Poland had, as a baby, been thrown out of a transport train, tightly wrapped in a pillow, and rescued. Now a grandmother, her only clue to the identity of her biological family was her mother’s first name. She was approached by a man at the Gathering who had once lived in her family’s Polish town, had known her parents and older brothers, and now had spotted her in the crowd because of her resemblance to her mother. And so, by chance, she was reunited with her lost family through a stranger’s memories.

  For most of those at the Gathering it was the first time they felt safe to share their secrets with anyone. One man even unbuttoned his shirt and showed others the comforting Christian cross he had worn around his neck for years but had never before shown a soul.

  Susan Sanders, a social worker in her thirties, had convinced her entire family to come. Susan had grown up in New York, afraid to ask questions about her mother’s experiences and the grandparents missing from their lives. Her curiosity had deepened in graduate school at Berkeley after hearing about groups for second-generation survivors and seeing Myriam Abramowicz’s documentary As If It Were Yesterday.

  When she learned about the Gathering a few years later, she convinced her mother—who by then had moved to Delray, Florida—to sign up and confront her past for the whole family’s sake. Watching the proceedings, Susan was mesmerized by the sight of so many people who had “the same investment.” Almost immediately she was relieved that her mother had found a community. During a break, a journalist from the Palm Beach Post collared her mother, who reluctantly shared her story and wound up on the Post’s front page the following Monday, becoming a local celebrity whose background surprised even her closest friends.

  Flora Hogman took mental notes as she watched others pour out their hearts and their hidden pasts to journalists. Something about it troubled her. Later, in an article she wrote about the conference for the New York State Psychological Association, Flora would speculate about the paradoxical effects of all the media attention: “Such belated recognition and sometimes ‘awe,’ while it provided a thrust of energy, with strong beneficial effects for the victims . . . is also safe for the outside world. It is a part of history, distant for those who listen. At times it might feel a bit phony. Why did it have to wait fifty years and happen by chance? In addition, the press, while giving due to the hardships of these survivors, also emphasized resilience against impossible odds. It could provide a temporary feeling of grandiosity for the victim. . . . Does it represent a real sense of acceptance of the suffering?”

  Away from the media, however, solidarity, solace, and perspective were easier to achieve. The conference converted feelings of shame into a new currency—pride and a sense of community, continuity, and reconnection.

  A surprising number of former hidden children had, like Sophie, Flora, and Carla, gone into helping professions; they were physicians, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, and many had written about the “hidden child phenomenon.” Not that these career choices were indicative of any inclination to open up themselves. Bloeme Evers-Emden, a child psychologist who had been hidden in Holland until August 1944, when she was caught by the SS and sent to Auschwitz, had not been able to talk about her experiences with her husband or any of their six children. She summed up the logic behind the hidden children’s silence: “They adapted very quickly to their new surroundings, hardly crying for their parents—an important survival tactic. The reasoning seemed to be, ‘I must surely have been a bad child that my parents gave me away; I must be a very good child now lest these people give me away.’” Moreover, their grief and anger had to compete with survivor’s guilt: why had they survived when so many children perished in the camps and elsewhere? And there had been guilt about the living as well—guilt over their lost love for parents who survived and rejoined, or tried to rejoin, their children, many of whom had really known only their hiding parents. Evers-Emden found that while two-thirds of surviving parents felt that the bond with their reunited children had been restored, only a third of the children felt that way.

  While many hidden children had become high-functioning professionals, they had also grown up with an impaired ability to form lasting bonds and close friendships, or even to seek temporary therapeutic bonds. After the Gathering, these wounds beg
an to surface in written accounts that were filled with cries of loneliness and isolation. In the Hidden Child Foundation newsletter, which began publishing shortly after the conference, “Felicity G.,” who was pulled out of a train bound for Auschwitz, hid as a Catholic, and survived the war to marry an Orthodox rabbi, would write: “All my life I have felt I lived a lie. Always, even to this day, it seemed that I really did not belong anywhere.”

  “As I got older,” wrote Renee Kuker, hidden for five years by Polish Catholic peasants, “I could not shake that feeling of my unimportance in relation to others and in relation to events. . . . I felt like a stranger on earth, an unwelcome intruder.” After being hidden in a Czech orphanage, Chava Kolar became “distrustful of the whole world and of every person in it. . . . I have never succeeded in really belonging, in feeling completely at ease with people, even with friends, in forming one single lasting bond.”

  Often forgotten, even among the forgotten, were the hidden infant survivors. The most heartbreaking entries in the pages of the Hidden Child Foundation newsletter would be appeals for information from former infants, hidden by Catholics, who had lost their real families and never learned the first thing about their original Jewish identities, not even their real names:

  I was told that someone found me on the steps of a house on Ochota in Warsaw. . . . I had a ribbon with a note attached on my left hand: “Zofia Jadwiga, born February 17, 1942. Do not give any information at any time.”

  I am looking for information about my background. I have done lots of research for seven years and have gotten nowhere. I have been told that I was born in a camp in Holland in the first half of 1941. . . . I had dark, full hair, dark eyes, no marks. My name may have been Miriam.

  THE HIERARCHY OF SUFFERING

  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 hid
den 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.”