Edith Hahn Beer was not alone in her strategy. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust notes that many Jewish children were baptized into Christianity, adopted Christian identities, and rigorously suppressed their Jewish ancestry in order to avoid extermination. Being divorced from their families, culture, and religion carried a steep emotional cost. But it saved their lives, and some were able to reintegrate with surviving family members after the war.
As the museum exhibition explains, many children had to wait until the end of the war to discover that their parents had been killed. Others were kept hidden from their parents after the war, and in some cases the families had to pay “redemption fees” to reclaim their children.
One of the children featured in the exhibition is Lida Kleinman (later Lidia Siciarz). Born in Poland in 1932, Lida was sent at the age of ten into hiding to live as a Catholic in orphanages, where she survived until the end of the war. The exhibit records her adult remembrance of that time: “We went to Warsaw . . . we were dispersed in different homes . . . Sister Sophia called me and said to me, ‘There’s a priest over there and you have to go and take communion . . . he is going to ask you . . . if you are Jewish. . . .’ She simply told me, ‘you just have to lie and it’s not going to be a big sin, God will understand.’”
Simon Jeruchim — who in 2001 published his memoir Hidden in France: A Boy’s Journey under the Nazi Occupation — was one of the thousands of other Jewish children who passed for Christian to survive the war. He was born in Paris in 1929. During the Nazi occupation of France, Simon and his younger siblings were sent into hiding on farms in Normandy. He was reunited after the war with his brother and sister, and in 1949, they began new lives in the United States. However, they never saw their parents again, and would have to wait half a century before learning that they had been killed at Auschwitz.
In a recording available on the museum’s website, Simon recalls working as a farmhand for a devoutly Christian family in Normandy:
These people were very religious . . . They didn’t ask any question whether I was a devout Christian or not, but it was taken for granted that I would be a Christian, so every night we had to pray . . . this was a hard floor, you get on your knees, and without long pants it is tough on your knees . . . Of course at the beginning I would mumble . . . Eventually I borrowed — I won’t say I stole — I borrowed a prayer book when I was guarding the cows and just memorized everything in one sitting . . . and then I knew all the prayers even better than they did . . . We went to church once a week . . . I don’t think she ever thought I was Jewish . . . they didn’t even know what Jews would look like. They were so backwards . . . They didn’t read newspapers. Those who had radios were the rare ones. Of course they knew there was such a thing as Jews but for them they bought into the myth that Jews had horns and since I didn’t have horns or a tail, I was okay.
The suppression of one’s blood or ancestral identity — even if it is voluntary — can exact a serious price. Hahn Beer writes about her painful efforts to reintegrate with the Jewish community in the immediate aftermath of the war. She met Jewish men who had been held in concentration camps during the war and spewed vitriol at her upon learning that she had survived by marrying a Nazi officer.
In other cultures and racial groups too, the act of passing can create great pain, either for the ones who have passed or for their children. The Canadian writer Wayne Grady, author of numerous non-fiction books, recently released his first novel, Emancipation Day, which dramatizes the psychological toll exacted by passing. The protagonist, Jack Lewis, has grown up in a black family in Windsor, Ontario, but when the novel opens he is passing for white in Newfoundland during World War II. Lewis falls in love with a local white woman, marries her, and after the war moves with her back to Windsor — without coming clean about his family background.
Emancipation Day draws its title from a day by the same name in Canada — August 1, which is celebrated by many African-Canadians as the anniversary of the British abolition of slavery in 1834. Grady’s novel hinges on the tension created by Jack’s secret, and by his active suppression of the truth about his own family. Grady wrote the novel years after discovering, in mid-life, that his own father was black and had kept this secret from his son.
“I was about fifty when I learned that my father’s family (i.e. my family) were members of Windsor’s black community, and that my father had passed for white during the war,” Grady said to me in an email. “I was never able to talk to my father about my discovery: I tried, but he continued to deny any knowledge of his family’s history. ‘News to me,’ is all he would say. How did I feel? Right from the beginning I was fascinated, overjoyed is not too strong a word here: I had grown up with no extended family, since my father’s passing meant that he had turned his back on his parents and brothers and sister, and I had never met any of them except when I was too young to ask awkward questions. I felt I had suddenly been given a past. I was angry with my father for having denied me a family, a history, and I was further angry with him for continuing to refuse to tell me anything about his own past. I understand it — passing involves an enormous capacity for self-deception and denial — but it still frustrated and angered me. In fact, that anger got in the way of writing the novel for a good ten years. I had to get over my anger at my father and treat Jack Lewis as a character, with enough good qualities to explain why Vivian would fall in love with him in the first place, and stay with him when the truth began to come out.”
One of the emotional problems related to passing is that, to succeed, you must eradicate your past and convince all people who matter of the “truth” of your new, fictional identity. In the case of surviving the Holocaust, escaping slavery, or avoiding the ravages and restricted possibilities associated with racial hatred and racial segregation, the act of passing is serious business. You have to succeed. If you are caught, the consequences may be severe. You must be on guard at all times against the possibility of being betrayed by your blood.
For example, Belle da Costa Greene — librarian to the American financier and art collector J. P. Morgan, and the first director of the Pierpoint Morgan Library — was born of African-American parents in Washington, D.C., in 1883. After her parents separated, Belle and her mother and siblings passed for white, changing their names. Her mother changed her maiden name to Van Vliet to pretend that she had Dutch ancestry, and Belle took on the middle name da Costa as a way to explain her looks, considered by some to be exotic. For a woman who developed a reputation as an effective and influential librarian, and who was committed to preserving records — not destroying them — Belle da Costa Greene took an unusual step shortly before she died in New York City in 1950: she burned her personal papers. Imagine how strongly one must want to incinerate one’s secrets to expunge them not just from the living record but posthumously as well.
THERE ARE COUNTLESS STORIES about racial passing in North America. Anatole Broyard, the celebrated New York Times literary critic who died in 1990, was born of African-American parents in New Orleans and raised mostly in Brooklyn. He aspired to write but did not want to be defined by his blackness, so he took advantage of his light skin colour (both of his African-American parents were Louisiana Creoles) and passed for white. The journalist Brent Staples wrote in the New York Times in 2003 that Broyard wanted to be a writer — and not just a “Negro writer,” consigned to the back of the literary bus. Writing for the New Yorker, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates noted that Broyard “did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy.” And so Broyard constructed a white identity for himself. He did not inform his own children that he was black. His daughter, Bliss Broyard, wrote in her memoir, One Drop, about how Broyard — even when he had advanced prostate cancer and his body was wracked with pain — resisted telling her broth
er Todd and her about his secret ancestry. One Drop opens with a story from two months before Broyard died, when he met with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, Bliss and Todd, in their home in Martha’s Vineyard. When Alexandra asked if there was anything that the ailing Anatole would like to tell his children, Anatole prevaricated. When his wife persisted by announcing that Anatole had lived with a secret for a long time, Anatole tried to shut her up by saying, “Goddamn it, Sandy.”
A man who spent his life spinning words on the page, and became one of the most highly respected literary critics in the United States, could not, even with death at the door, say the three words “I am black.” When both children pressed him to tell the secret to which their mother alluded, Broyard said he would tell them, but not that day. “I need to think about how to present things,” he said. “I want to order my vulnerabilities so they don’t get magnified during the discussion.” But he never did answer their questions.
The distance between ancestral and constructed identities haunted Broyard beyond the grave. Much earlier in life, he had married a black Puerto Rican woman named Aida Sanchez. Together they had a daughter named Gala. The couple divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II. Subsequently, Broyard married Alexandra Nelson, a white American woman of Norwegian heritage. They raised their children as white. The day after Broyard died, in 1990, an obituary ran in the New York Times — the same newspaper for which he had worked as book critic, essayist, and editor. The obituary contained 811 words, but it did not include a single mention of his first wife, of his first and eldest daughter, of their African ancestry, or of his. And, as Bliss Broyard informs readers in One Drop, Broyard’s death certificate lists him as white.
Gates, the Harvard historian, argues that in shelving his true identity in order to inhabit one that he purposefully constructed, Broyard failed to live up to his greatest potential as a writer. He lost touch with himself, Gates argues, and thus he lost the ability to write profoundly. He had shown great promise as a creative writer, but ultimately settled into the life of reviewing books by other people.
Even by his own children, Broyard was taken to be white. For them, he lived and died as white. Did that make him white? Being of Creole ancestry, he had white ancestry as well as black. So who is to say that moving into one part of his identity — a part that would not normally be recognized, but that cannot factually be denied either — was fraudulent or wrong? The problem is that one could not be both black and white in America. Being in any way black made you black. For Broyard to become white, he could no longer acknowledge any blackness.
Philip Roth writes in his novel The Human Stain about the character Coleman Silk, a white man (from all appearances) who is hounded from his job as a university professor after inadvertently uttering a racial epithet in his classroom. It is an absurd situation, because Silk refers to some students who have never shown up in class as “spooks,” by which he means ghosts. But as it turns out the missing students are black, and his unfortunate word choice is taken as a racial epithet. Over the course of the novel, we learn that Silk is an African-American who has passed as a white, Jewish man in order to decide his own fate in the world, rather than having others do that for him. Silk married a white woman but never told her or their four children about his racial background.
Some people have speculated publicly — including on Wikipedia — that the novelist Philip Roth may have drawn upon the life of Anatole Broyard to write The Human Stain. Roth had met Broyard at least twice. Once, the two men met unexpectedly in a men’s clothing store on Madison Avenue in New York City. Roth spontaneously bought him a pair of shoes as a playful mock ploy to curry the literary critic’s favour. In an article published in 2012 in the New Yorker, Roth acknowledged that he had heard many years earlier that Broyard was secretly “an octoroon.” (This term is meant to describe a person considered to have one-eighth black blood, although in reality Broyard’s parents were both blacks.) However, the novelist vehemently refuted the suggestion that Broyard’s life had inspired the creation of Coleman Silk.
Regardless of whether Roth’s imagination was tinged by having known a fragment of the literary critic’s personal background, the real Broyard and the fictional Silk certainly paid their dues for having passed. Neither man appears to have been truly in touch with himself. In the case of the real man, Broyard had every right to choose his path. He got the job with the New York Times, which he would have been unlikely to snag had the paper’s editors known he was black. But he paid a price. He deprived himself of an open, intimate, publicly acknowledged connection to his own family heritage. In so doing, he robbed his children of the same opportunity, at least while he was alive and they were young and still shielded from the truth. Still more people lost out. He denied Americans of all races and backgrounds the chance to know his gifts and genius, in all their rich complexity. He buried a beautiful truth that might have galvanized dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of people — but we will never know for sure, because Anatole Broyard died with his secret largely intact.
A famously unusual case of passing is found in the story of the Texan journalist and photographer John Howard Griffin, who decided in 1959 to attempt to document the real meaning of being black in America. Griffin, who was white, consulted a physician and underwent a series of treatments by means of drugs, sun lamps, and skin creams to make his skin look brown. He shaved his head so that his straight hair would not give him away. And he bused and hitchhiked into some of the most racist zones of the United States, such as New Orleans, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia, to write about his experiences. His 1961 book, Black Like Me, became a bestseller and is still remembered a half-century later. Oddly, a white man passed for black to tell a primarily white audience what it truly meant to be black. Did John Howard Griffin truly become a black man? He was certainly considered one by the people he met in the course of his journalistic quest.
Most observers today would probably agree that Griffin was not black, but only posing as black. But what if, instead of choosing to undergo treatments to make his skin look brown as an adult, Griffin had been exposed to such treatments as an infant? What if his parents had found doctors willing to experiment on him? And what if he had then been orphaned and adopted as a black child, and his appearance had remained unchanged for the rest of his life? If he had lived out the entirety of his life as a black man, would he then have been legitimately black? I would have to say yes. He would have been legitimately black because the world would have seen him so. This has nothing to do with blood or biology, and everything to do with social interaction and the negotiation of one’s identity in public and private spheres.
Although some may now consider Griffin’s approach offensive, it can also be seen as a testament to the arbitrary nature of race, and to the insanity of imagining that racial identity is rooted in the nature of one’s blood. John Howard Griffin had to hide his own white identity to investigate and later expose what it meant to be black in America.
Another reversal of racial identity took place in 1930 in Oakville, Ontario, when a young World War I veteran named Ira Johnson became engaged to a white woman named Isabella Jones. Johnson had grown up as black in Oakville and was widely considered black by the black community in town. His mother had been a midwife serving black mothers, and his family had attended a black church. However, when the Ku Klux Klan came into town burning crosses and threatening Johnson’s life, he was naturally afraid. He invited the Toronto Star into his home and declared that he was not black, but of Cherokee descent. The Toronto Star bought it, entirely. On the front page of its March 5, 1930, edition, the Star ran an article with the headline “Is of Indian Descent Ira Johnson Insists: Oakville Man, Separated from His Sweetheart, Traces His Ancestry.”
The article began with this lead paragraph: “Ira Junius Johnson, separated from his sweetheart, Alice Jones by Ku Klux Klansmen here last Friday, is of Indian descent and has
not a drop of negro blood in his veins, he told the Star yesterday at the home of his mother, who is a refined and intelligent woman.”
My own interviews in the 1990s with Alvin Duncan, a black resident of Oakville who was a teenager at the time of the KKK raid, confirmed that at the very least, the members of Oakville’s black community had always assumed that Johnson was black. Perhaps he tried to establish a new, Cherokee identity to avoid the wrath of the KKK. He certainly would have had good reason to fear the group, which was well known for the lynching of blacks in the United States. On the other hand, there is the possibility that Johnson did have Aboriginal ancestry. Perhaps we will never know for sure, but the incident provides yet another example of the negotiation of racial identity and the lengths to which people will go to keep their blood ancestry secret because of persecution and pressure from the outside world. Tomorrow, perhaps, things will change. But today, race has nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with what people will believe.
FOR CENTURIES, RACE HAS COME to be equated with blood. But will modern science displace that notion? Over recent years, as the science of genetics has evolved, increasing numbers of people, hungry for details about their ancestral history, have begun having their DNA tested to unearth clues about their past. Science now holds out certain promises that seemed hitherto impossible.
DNA tests have shattered a myth that persevered despite all common knowledge to the contrary: that blacks were black and whites were white, and that a person could absolutely not be both. To have admitted such a thing, historically, would have been to do much more than to admit the awful truth that white slave masters took black slave women into their beds. It would have reduced to rubble the foundations of an economy and society based on the subjugation of one people by another. For how could one subjugate the other if they were truly the same?
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