Child Holocaust Survivors: Memories and Reflections

By Robert Krell

The majority of children who survived the Holocaust, whether in hiding or in labour and concentration camps, remained silent about their wartime experiences.

Those who wanted to talk, were often silenced by well-meaning adults who advised them to forget the past and get on with their lives.

The memories and traumas simmered for nearly forty years, each child growing into adulthood thinking they alone struggled with the problems of traumatic memory, identity confusion and other consequences.

In the 1980's, there was a stirring of awareness amongst some child survivors about issues to be addressed. Small groups formed in the U.S.A. and Canada and gave birth to the child survivor movement, culminating in a large international gathering of "Hidden Children" in New York in 1991.

This book comprises a compilation of talks offered to child Holocaust survivors, over a 25 year period - from the birth of self-awareness to present day awareness of the need to inform the next generations of their parent's experiences.

Dasberg, Krell and Wiesel are themselves child survivors. Moskovitz founded the Los Angeles Child Survivor group following her pioneering study of child survivors. Gilbert has written and lectured extensively about children in the Holocaust.

This book offers the child survivor an opportunity to reflect not only on survival but its effects. For the spouses and children it clarifies some of the dynamics unique to their families and for Mental Health professionals it provides insights into the effects of trauma as well as the remarkable resilience of traumatized children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 29, 2007
• ISBN: 9781466994591

Robert Krell

Dr.Robert Krell was born in The Hague, Holland on August 5th 1940. He was hidden with a Christian family from 1942 to 1945 during the Holocaust. After the war ended he was returned to his parents who also survived in hiding. In 1951, he moved with his family to Vancouver, B.C. where he obtained an M.D. from the University of British Columbia, (UBC) and served as Professor of Psychiatry until 1995, when he became Professor Emeritus. During these years, driven to give a voice to those who survived the Holocaust, he not only co-founded in 1975, the annual BC High School Symposium on the Holocaust but in 1978 initiated the audiovisual documentation project on Holocaust survivors in the Vancouver area. Robert helped form child survivor groups in Los Angeles and Vancouver in 1983. In 1985 Robert founded the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance which built a memorial in 1987 and established a Holocaust Education Centre in 1994. This Centre reaches 25,000 students annually. For these activities he received in 1998 the State of Israel Bonds Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award. Robert also served on the International Advisory Council of the Hidden Child Conference that organized the 1991 gathering in New York as well as volunteering with the Canadian Jewish Congress - Pacific Region, becoming its Chair and then National Vice President. (1986-1992) Robert Krell has co-edited and authored numerous books, book chapters and articles. He is invited to speak around the world on the impact of the Holocaust on child survivors, their memories and reflections. Robert is married and has three children and five grandchildren.

Book preview

CHILD HOLOCAUST

SURVIVORS:

MEMORIES AND REFLECTIONS

With contributions from Haim Dasberg

Martin Gilbert

Sarah Moskovitz

Elie Wiesel

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Copyright 2007 Robert Krell.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

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Cover Photos:

Yakov Avraham Stelzer and Kreindle Klausner. My maternal grandparents who were

murdered in Poland in 1943. Estera Stelzer-Krell and Robbie, their daughter and grandson

in 1940.

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library

and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN: 978-1-4251-3720-5

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CONTENTS

1.   Some Unique Aspects Of Child Survivors

2.   Making Sense Of Survival: A Journey With Child Survivors Of The Holocaust

3.   Reverberations Of The Holocaust In Survivor Families

4.   Hiding During And After The War

5.   Hidden Memories

6.   Children Of The Holocaust Now And Then

7.   What Happened To Hidden Children During And After The War?

8.   Not To Forget

9.   The Challenge Of Being A Child Survivor Of The Holocaust

10.   The Psychologic Challenges Facing Child Survivors Of The Holocaust, Hidden Or Otherwise

11.   Facing Memories: Silent No More

12.   Child Survivors Of The Holocaust: The Future Of Our Past

13.   Jewish Child Survivors As Displaced Persons

14.   Child Survivors Of The Holocaust And Deja Vue

15.   Holocaust Child Survivors: Looking Back, Looking Forward

16.   Een Hollands Jongetje Komt Terug (A Little Dutch Boy Returns)

17.   Selected Bibliography

Dedication

In memory of my hiders (1942-1945)

Albert and Violette Munnik

and Nora

of The Hague, Holland

Inscribed as Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

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INTRODUCTION

This is a book of talks and writings prepared primarily for child survivors of the Holocaust and for those interested to know more about the complexities of living life as a survivor. Most lectures were offered at various gatherings of survivors and their children. The thoughts expressed, often deeply personal, resonated with those who had previously felt they were alone and unique in their struggle with memory and identity.

Each piece stands on its own merit and can be read independently of the others. This book need not be read in order, although its chronology from 1983 to 2005 does provide some insight over time as to the challenges that confront the child Holocaust survivor.

I take responsibility for the minor editing required to commit speeches to print. Where repetition is noted, it was left simply to retain the integrity of each original presentation.

This book is meant to speak to you, the children of the Shoah. And to anyone interested in us—our spouses, our children, our friends and healers and researchers. Get to know us. We have emotions and thoughts so unique that often we feel alone except in the company of others with similar experiences.

May you find comfort in self-knowledge, greater understanding, and a degree of pride in having survived survival. We are a celebration of the resilience of the human soul and spirit.

Robert Krell

1

As I was preparing the outline of this book, I wondered at what point I personally went public with my own identity as a child survivor.

It was not hard to find. For a public commemorative Kristallnacht lecture I delivered in Vancouver on November 9, 1981 my title was Contemporary Responses to Kristallnacht—Views of a Child of the Holocaust.

At one point this passage—I am a child of the Holocaust. No day passes in my life without a thought of those times. Not a day is free from the Holocaust. No night passes without a dream.

That is still true today.

In 1983, Sarah Moskovitz had initiated a first meeting of child survivors in the Los Angeles area. There was uncertainty among the participants as to why they should meet, to what purpose, for what objectives. It was unclear as to who was a child survivor and what, if any place, existedfor this being. Sarah asked me to offer remarks to the group at the second meeting in order to provide focus.

These are the remarks to the fledgling Child Survivor Group of Los Angeles in 1983 at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

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Robert Krell

1

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SOME UNIQUE ASPECTS OF CHILD SURVIVORS

Robert Krell (1983)

OF ALL VOICES OF THE HOLOCAUST, we have been perhaps the most silent, the least noticed, or if noticed, not identified as the children. For several years now I have been involved with documentation projects which record audiovisually the eyewitness accounts of survivors. It is only the children, now in their mid-forties to mid-fifties, who protest that their stories are not particularly important or that they have forgotten too much, or that their experience does not really compare with the real survivors, namely those in concentration camps.

I am here to tell you differently. Our stories are worth telling and they are worth hearing. But we must choose our listeners carefully, and with purpose. For when we do speak, we who are so few and who must speak for so many, we have the awesome task of explaining that which is inexplicable, and/or teaching the unteachable. How shall our audiences believe that which our families could not believe until the moment the chamber doors closed, the open pit beckoned, the dog attacked? And to add to the possibility of not being believed, we now face over seventy books written to deny the very occurrence of our tragedy.

In 1945, in that summer after liberation, I was five years old. Between May and August 1945, I heard stories no child should ever hear. They have lasted for a lifetime. My memory begins at age two and a half. Just prior to that, we were to report for deportation for resettlement to the East. My parents knew only one thing for sure. Since 1940, of the Dutchmen, Jews and non-Jews who had been resettled, none had ever returned.

We therefore went into hiding, each separately and each of us survived independently.

I must say that compared with other child survivors, I lived a life of relative comfort and safety. Perhaps the only deprivation was to remain inside an apartment for the duration of the war and to eat beets and tulip bulbs, rather than milk and eggs.

But here in relating my good fortune, I, like other children, minimize the impact. Over time I have become aware that the issue of extreme or moderate deprivation is not so important as the total impact of the Holocaust on the lived life experience of the child survivor.

I must admit, it had not occurred to me that there were such people as child survivors until 1981 when I was at the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem. There Rabbi Lau, the Chief Rabbi of Nethanya, stated he thought himself to be the youngest person liberated from Buchenwald at age eight. Shortly after, I read two books, one was Saul Friedlander’s When Memory Comes, and Sarah Moskovitz’ Love Despite Hate—Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives.

It opened a new world to me.

As a six year old, given the images and the stories, I somehow felt resigned to the notion that the future, my future, included a concentration camp. The powerlessness of childhood, complicated by victimization and the loss of most of life’s anchors, does not generate optimism. But life has afforded new opportunities and it is the opportunities we must think about and nurture, and develop. We have to set our priorities and they need not necessarily be the same for all of us. But we must talk today and discuss what might be the objectives of a group of people with our disparate, yet all-too-similar backgrounds.

Where in fact do we fit into the scheme of things? How shall we move from the periphery to the centre of involvement, and for what reasons?

It is not surprising to see that child survivors have needed time in order to take leadership roles. Virtually deprived of childhood and adolescence, it took all our resources simply to reintegrate, to readapt to life, and live it with at least a semblance of normality.

Let me tell you about a friend, a long time friend. We first met in 1953, after he had been in Vancouver for four years and I, approximately two. We have known each other throughout medical school and residency training. We always talked about the Holocaust. That was no problem between the two of us. But he never mentioned it anywhere else. Nor I for that matter. He had lived for many years in forests and after the war, having lost his parents as well as his older brother, made his way back to Rumania, then into an orphanage in Russia, and subsequently escaped to Sweden and then came to Canada. I convinced him to attend the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Israel in 1981, and as it happened, he and one of his sons were on the plane from New York that I was on as well. It is only since then that he has allowed himself to be more centrally involved and he has participated with me on a panel to discuss some of the issues that confront child survivors. It was this panel which we presented, that opened us to thinking about unique aspects of the child survivor’s existence.

To provide you with just a few thoughts. The child survivor differs from adult survivors in a number of ways. First, the older survivor possesses a memory, a memory of family and tradition. Therefore the older survivor tends to have an identity shaped firmly by his Jewish past. The older survivor sought nurturing and comfort from either marrying another survivor or at least remaining attached to a survivor group. And for the most part, although the older survivors were different from Canadian culture generally, they did not remain in hiding.

The child or adolescent survivor frequently has only fragments of memory.

Some know little of their past, a few not even their first language. There are enormous problems of identity, having been clearly labelled a Jew but not with the attendant knowledge of tradition. In fact, many child survivors in hiding, were given a profound conflict in identity by having to adopt Christianity as a cover for their survival. Once arrived in Canada, the child survivors attempted to be more Canadian than Canadians. This sometimes involved intermarriage, certainly at least marriage to someone without a survivor background. And perhaps most complicated of all, child survivors having been taught so carefully to remain still and silent, to hide their affect and emotion, to hide generally, resulted in many still remaining hidden to this day.

It appears also that child survivors do not really identify with the survivor group because they feel their experiences are not truly worthy of survivor category.

What a complicated puzzle, what a complicated existence. To be a survivor but on the margin of survivorhood, to be a Canadian but on the margin of its society, to be a member of the Jewish community but to remain the immigrant, the outsider, the not totally integrated member of Judaism. It is no wonder that we feel at home in many places, for no place is really home. Nevertheless, wherever we find ourselves today, it is time to put our collective energies into action. We are under attack.

A very serious and organized attack. As Irwin Cotler, the former President of the Canadian Jewish Congress stated in a public address in Vancouver, British Columbia—These are difficult days in the history of the Jewish people and in the human condition as a whole. The Jewish people, as we move through the eighties, are a people that, alone, they stand indicted at the bar of mankind. A people who it is sought once again to portray as a pariah people, as beyond the pale, as being antihuman, in the same way it was sought in Kristallnacht to portray the Jews as being an inferior race. The degradation that paved the way for the Holocaust is being repeated. Delegitimization has become the code word, the organizing frame of reference with which the Jewish people are filtered and evaluated and judged. Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, has said, The Jewish people are the only people in the world today whose group defamation is increasingly coming to receive the sanction of public international law. The message is clear.

I have a fantasy. You have heard of Heifetz, Menuhin, Rubinstein, Freud, Einstein, Buber, and more recently Perlman, Zuckerman, Sabin, Salk, Wiesel, and Fackenheim.

We will never know who was lost to us in those six millions. My fantasy is that amongst them, the potential musicians, philosophers, physicians, Rabbis and scientists, we lost those who would have eradicated cancer, controlled the use of nuclear energy, liberated the oppressed and fed the hungry.

We now carry that legacy of the unknown. And none of us alone can ever aspire to reach the heights of those who never had the opportunity. But we must try.

And what is it that we must do?

These are important years. The years in which we can exercise the power of our very existence. We, through an accident of fate, regained our lives and have seen in our lifetime a new power afforded by the existence of the State of Israel. It is that existence, and only that, which enables us to free ourselves from the ghetto mentality. We are witnessing for the first time in many thousands of years of Jewish history, the exercise of Jewish power. Reflect only for a moment on what the passive endurance of unpredictable assaults created. Reflect only for a moment on what were the consequences of Jewish silence before and during the Second World War.

Remember well what it was to be powerless, the captive citizens of a state without recourse