Decades after the war, we were told that we were only children and did not really understand what had happened, or that we had not really suffered, or that our memories were inaccurate; that we should forget the past and get on with our lives. And that is what we have done. For several decades we have not spoken out and have not identified ourselves as survivors of the Holocaust.
In 2015, Stefanie Seltzer and Daisy Miller describe the motivation of the formerly hidden children to organise themselves.
© World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust & Descendants
Most Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in Belgium – from newborns to teenagers – were hidden from the Germans: they were enfants cachés (hidden children). Their experiences were very diverse, depending on their age and their circumstances, but most of them had one thing in common: at a time of utmost danger, their parents or foster parents left them to face an uncertain future and in the care of unknown people. The children had to take responsibility for their own survival and conceal their identity, their name and even more so, their religion. Their uncertainty of whether their parents were still alive, their fear, and in fact all their feelings, had to be hidden. The situation was generally even more difficult for those who had been rescued from Germany on a Kindertransport.
After liberation, many hidden children discovered that their parents had been murdered. Others returned to parents who had become strangers and had to start a new family life all over again. The realisation after the war that they were not able to talk to their parents who had returned from the camps, about what they had experienced, created a feeling of mistrust. The experiences of these Hidden Children were neglected in both Jewish and in non-Jewish post-war Belgium.
Even as adults, the rescued children did not see themselves as a being a separate group for many decades. Nevertheless, aspects and fragments of their history were collected as individual Hidden Children, including Kindertransport children, published their stories. Silvain Brachfeld, who became the chronicler of Jewish Antwerp before the Holocaust, also collected documents and interviews from the survivors.
In 1991, a congress called “The Hidden Child” took place in New York. Subsequently, Belgian survivors founded the organization l’Enfant Caché asbl./Het Ondergedoken Kind vzv. (EC). Marcel Frydman (psychologist and former chairman of the EC) has spoken about the beginning of a therapeutic process. Children who were at one time hidden, began talking about their experiences, often for the first time.
The organisation had up to 1,800 members temporarily and today it still has over 500. One of its main tasks remains to bear witness to its members’ life-stories. In 1991, the recognition of being a victim of the Holocaust was the priority. On the initiative of l’Enfant Caché, many helpers were honoured as Righteous among the Nations in Yad Vashem. At present, the EC is committed to building a Wall of the Righteous at the central memorial site in Anderlecht, on which the names of those who hid and saved Jewish children are to be immortalised. ÄW
