André Stein - Hidden Children: Forgotten Survivors of the Holocaust

A few years ago I read the book Quiet Heroes by Stein (about Christian rescuers during the Holocaust) so I was quite interested to read Hidden Children. It tells the stories of ten children who survived the Holocaust by going into hiding.


It is an excellent survey of the different sorts of experiences that these children had, ranging from relatively safe to constant peril. It also does a wonderful job of showing the different types of people who did the rescuing. Some fit the bill of the commonly-described Christian rescuer, saving the Jewish refugees out of the goodness of their hearts. Others, however, did it only so long as they received payments, or so long as they were allowed to forcibly convert the children to Christianity. Still others took in children but were horribly abusive to them.

Throughout the book Stein does a very good job of linking the ten stories with a number of themes. One such theme was a sense of shame for being Jewish. Being children, they only knew that they were being persecuted because they were Jewish, so therefore being Jewish must be a bad thing. Another common theme for many of the children was a sense of resentment or estrangement towards parents who left them in hiding in order to save them. In many cases the children felt that they were being punished. For others who found loving homes they were not eager to return to parents of whom they had little memory. Yet another theme was a sense of guilt for not being able to save family members who had been taken away. Many of the children felt that they should have been able to do something to save them, even though there was nothing that they could have done. Finally, the most prevalent theme was one of silence. The children were taught to remain silent and secretive during the war years, and once the war ended they generally found that they world did not want to hear they experiences, especially the experiences of children that were thought not to be terribly reliable. This sense of silence and internalization in many cases continued into adulthood.

I have nothing critical to say about this book whatsoever. It was an excellent and moving read, and anyone interested in the Holocaust should read it.