Such Good Girls (26 page)

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.

AM I A CHRISTIAN OR A JEW?

By forcing so many Jewish children to hide or abandon their Judaism in order to survive, the Germans demonstrated that, while Jewish genes could not be renounced, a child’s religious faith could be irrevocably altered.

This aspect of Sophie’s story had been a subliminal attraction for me. The idea that the descendant of two long lines of Jews could so readily believe herself to be an anti-Semitic Catholic was fascinating. My own religious identity at times seemed tenuous; I was the product of an upbringing that was Jewish in name, culture, and history but without being religious. When my Catholic neighbor and friend John called me a “Christ-killer” at seven, I had no idea what he was talking about, so devoid of overt anti-Semitism and religious rivalry was the milieu of my childhood.

I was raised in a friendly fog of religious freedom, born into a community where no one appeared to give Jews a second look, even if anti-Semitism still operated openly in my father’s textile industry, prompting him to briefly change his name to Ross. I grew up thinking that Jewishness, far from stigmatizing me, actually conferred an extra measure of appeal. Who wouldn’t want to be a Jew in the same 1960s society as Sandy Koufax, Paul Newman, and Sammy Davis Jr.?

My parents were founding members of a Reform temple that looked like an extremely large split-level ranch house. The sedate services, which had been shorn of all alien traces of Hasidism, lacked joy. They were enlivened only by our charismatic, rabble-rousing rabbi, but he no longer believed in bar and bat mitzvahs because “thirteen was too young for any important decisions or for acquiring sufficient knowledge to be an adult Jew in any intelligent sense.” To me, Judaism was not a world of specific rites and ceremonies, but a comforting community based on deeply humanistic and democratic values, humor, dissent, existential rumination, and a penchant for salty and smoked fish.

I identified with those who had lost touch with Judaism and had to decide later in life what being Jewish actually meant to them. After all, what it meant to be Jewish was not a question I could easily answer either, nor did I feel particularly compelled to answer, since I had always viewed competing religious beliefs as little more than an issue of which set of narratives you happened to grow up with. Although countless people throughout history have died rather than renounce their religion, the Holocaust’s hidden children didn’t have the luxury of conscious martyrdom. What did their intrinsic Jewishness consist of now if it could be so easily replaced?

And what did it mean to embrace it again?

I didn’t know whom to identify with,” Flora said of her years after the war. “I knew I was Jewish, but I didn’t know I was Jewish.”

Like Sophie and Carla, Flora had been born to assimilated parents with only a modest sense of religious tradition and little consciousness, before Nazism, of being the persecuted “other.” Her ambiguous or diluted relationship to Judaism was not caused by her wartime experiences so much as exacerbated by it. Instead of simply professing a vaguely apologetic “cultural Jewishness” as an adult, like so many reform and nonobservant Jews everywhere, Flora has had to contend with a more serious confusion of religious identities—and perhaps more than most hidden children—since she had had multiple religions and spiritual disciplines foisted upon her. “I was lost. I was telling everyone I was Protestant, but I became an atheist.” When she finally tried to resolve her religious identity in her thirties, “I figured out it was ridiculous.” When she finally had a seder, she held it on Easter Sunday.

Flora became interested in studying other child survivors’ struggles with split religious identity. In 1988 she published an article, “The Experience of Catholicism for Jewish Children During World War II.” She interviewed four Jewish women who, as girls, were saved by being hidden in convents or Catholic homes. All four women she studied were so enamored of their emergency religion that initially two wanted to become nuns, one wanted to be a Catholic Polish girl, and the fourth wished to be a saint. After Liberation, however, they found themselves in a religious prison. “Feeling abandoned by the church after the war,” Flora wrote, “alone and disillusioned, they still yearn to belong to the Christian world which is now seen as unreachable, while feelings linger that the adult Jewish world failed to protect them… . All four women struggled to develop an identity that would include their contradictory experiences, mostly by finding a connection with their Jewish roots so that they could ‘belong’ and also feel ‘good’ through the adoption of Jewish values and qualities.”

Flora blazed her own middle trail. She went to synagogue, but only for Yom Kippur. She celebrated Passover, but in her own way, emphasizing the courage and survival of the Jews. She visited her relatives in Israel but didn’t like Judaism’s “rules” or its “right wing.” She liked Judaism’s focus on life here on earth. “Somewhere in the Talmud, it says that men look in envy at heaven, but the angels look in envy at men,” she said. “My philosophy is ‘I’m lucky I’m alive, I have a responsibility to do my best, to be good to other people.’” But it’s a philosophy that’s often frustrated by the unimaginable inhumanity that blackened her life. “I manage to do what I can in a small way. My value is to enjoy life and not to be overwhelmed by everything.”

Flora summed up her religious experience with a shrug, saying “I’ve got a whole problem with God—or the idea of God.”

“Why didn’t I rebel against Judaism?” asked Sophie. After all, she was raised as an anti-Semitic Polish Catholic and kept her Jewishness from coworkers into her thirties. A compliant temperament provides part of the answer. “I always did what people said!” When she was five, her mother told her to be a Catholic and she obeyed. Six years later, when her mother informed her that she was really a Jew, the information was shocking, absurd, and initially useless to her, but at a deeper level, she experienced this too as an inescapable verdict. “I never asked myself, I never had the luxury of ‘Do I want it?’ So now I’m a Jew!” she recalled, laughing. In time she accepted it and even vowed to marry a Jew and raise Jewish children. “I always gave a hundred percent!” she said with a smile.

Still, when she attended High Holiday services at a conservative synagogue, she was extremely uncomfortable. Although she joined a reform temple in Great Neck, it was the aesthetics of it, the beautiful synagogue itself, that appealed to her as much as wanting to belong and connect with her ancestors.

Was Sophie the same adult that she would have been had she remained a Catholic? Since religion plays little religious role in Sophie’s life, it’s easy to believe that, whatever her faith, Sophie would be the same person—and precisely because her experience ultimately freed her from the man-made constructs and exclusivity of religious beliefs and committed her, like Flora, to a nondenominational gospel of kindness and responsibility. But we’ll never know, and who’s to say that Sophie, who kept her childhood rosary and her catechism until a museum finally claimed it, wouldn’t have become a devout Catholic had her mother not survived the war or had she decided to spare her daughter the trauma of religious confusion so soon after all the other losses?

For Carla, who is six years older than Flora and eight years older than Sophie, Judaism had had more time to take root in her consciousness. Moreover, she had only to keep her Judaism secret, not renounce it for Catholicism. But since Judaism for Carla, as for Flora and Sophie, was a cultural tradition rather than a formal religious commitment, she had that much less of it to conceal. “I remember once, in hiding,” Carla recalled seventy years after the fact, “thinking that there is no God. If there was one, he wouldn’t have put me in this position because I hadn’t done anything. The whole idea of a God who is good and everything was gone at the age of thirteen.”

Regardless, her ethnic and cultural connection to Judaism never weakened. In her eighties, Carla is “very Jewish, a very proud Jew. Ed and I don’t have a problem with our Jewish identity. Not only from the Holocaust, but from the Zionist organization after the war. When we lived in Israel on a nonreligious kibbutz for five years, we weren’t religious. We didn’t have to be!” Although she celebrates Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Hanukkah at home, she is otherwise nonobservant and doesn’t attend synagogue, not even on High Holidays.

The five years in Israel made her husband Ed “a very patriotic Jew. I’m not religious, but there’s something mystical that this people have survived. There are more people living now in Israel than were killed in the Holocaust. To me,” Ed said, “being Jewish is the most magical thing. It’s a privilege to belong to this amazing people, who’ve given more to mankind than any other people in the world.”

What does it mean to be a Jew?

The question is a matter of endless debate among unambivalent Jews everywhere, but for the hidden children the question is more immediate and even more unanswerable. Almost every Jew at the Gathering had been torn from their Jewish families and traditions by the Holocaust. For those hidden in convents, monasteries, and Christian families, the Catholic church and religion provided them with structure and beauty, positive and omniscient authority figures, a surrogate sense of family and belonging, a feeling of active control over their own and their family members’ fates through prayer, and a doctrine that made some sense of their suffering. At a time when Judaism was not simply reviled but punishable by death, Catholicism could be irresistible and its God benevolent, while the Jewish one appeared to be on some sort of sabbatical. If exposed to Catholicism at a very young age, they were faced with a later decision of whether to embrace a religion—Judaism—that they never knew had embraced them. If older, they were later confronted with the challenge of reconciling two historically antagonistic faiths they now experienced as competing for their loyalty and faith.

The religious choices child survivors made were influenced by numerous factors: their age, their temperament, the mysteries of personality, circumstance—and often whether they ever saw one or both of their parents again. For Shlomo Breznitz, this last factor may well have utterly changed the course of his life.

In Vrbove, Czechslovakia, in 1944, no Christian child seemed as Christian as an eight-year-old Jewish chess prodigy named Shlomo Breznitz. When his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins kept disappearing from Bratislava, his parents attempted to escape the Nazis by moving him and his sister Judith to a shtetl named Vrbove, which Shlomo later described in his memoir, Memory Fields, as “something out of a Chagall painting or a story by Sholem Aleichem … but by the time we arrived, any fiddlers that might have been on the roofs of Vrbove had been taken to Auschwitz.”

As a further precaution, the family converted to Christianity and the two children began taking private lessons in Catholicism. When the parents were tipped off about an impending deportation in September 1944, they tried to hide their children in a local orphanage run by the Benedictine Sisters, but they said they’d already taken as many Jewish children as they wished to. Another local orphanage run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent took in Shlomo and Judith, who said tearful good-byes to their parents, assuming they would be deported to Auschwitz.

Eight-year-old Shlomo was abused, taunted, beaten up, and humiliated by the older Christian orphans while all the while taking great pains to conceal his circumcision, even if it meant wetting his pants. Using his remarkable memory, Shlomo, who had already memorized prayers and passages from the Old Testament, now focused his formidable powers on the long Latin litanies that the nuns themselves couldn’t commit to memory, but had to read aloud as they walked the corridors and courtyard. That Shlomo had no knowledge of Latin didn’t prevent him from being able to recite the litanies at length. The Mother Superior, alerted to his talent by a Sister C., beckoned both of them to her office.