Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  Sophie loathes being regarded by others as a repository of all things Holocaust. “People are always coming up and saying, ‘Have you seen this movie, have you read that book, do you know this other survivor?’ You know, we work very hard subconsciously to appear normal”—she laughs—“and it’s seriously hard work to keep yourself from imploding. We don’t need people to keep giving us this negative energy.”

  Flora no longer worries so much about the effects of bringing up the fact that she survived the Holocaust. She used to get reactions more often either of the “How come you look so normal?” or else “Who wants to hear about it? Enough about the Holocaust!” variety, but now she can mention it more matter-of-factly and “march on to something else” without being snagged on her listener’s distress. But the problem persists: how to talk about it without being defined by it.

  “The ideal,” says Flora, who’s given the issue a lot of thought, “is for someone to listen empathically about what happened to you, without making what happened the whole of you, but seeing it as a part of you that doesn’t negate the rest of you. That’s what’s really therapeutic. The issue is how people seem to define the victimization as something so horrendous that they deny it even to themselves.”

  It can help, she thinks, if survivors reframe their disclosure. “There’s a way that the person who survived can talk about it, by saying, ‘Hey, you know, I survived the Holocaust’ rather than saying ‘I’m a survivor of the Holocaust.’ The former says it’s part of my life, but it’s not my whole life. Survivor is a label. When people say they’re survivors, the other doesn’t want to have anything to do with him or her—you know, we’re marked by the devil. And we all have to struggle with this,” Flora says quietly, “because we want to be authentic.”

  When Facing History first sent her to speak to schoolchildren, it was with the organization’s usual goal of sensitizing students to discrimination and persecution through Flora’s terrible childhood experiences. But what Flora learned from the students that day was also important. When she broke down in tears at the very beginning of her account, the students said nothing, and by not interfering with her obvious pain, they allowed Flora to reach her grief for the first time in decades. The children didn’t preempt her feelings with their own pity or discomfort.

  On other visits to schools, Flora has returned a favor by consoling students of German extraction who feel uncomfortable before her. She reminds them it’s not their fault, there’s no reason for them to feel bad, and in saying it, everyone feels a little better.

  “The responsibility,” Flora says, “is to remember history instead of feeling guilty about it.”

  A listener may feel inferior before a survivor because he believes he wouldn’t have had the courage himself to survive. Of course, resilience, adaptability, resourcefulness, and determination played their parts, but what survivors know, of course, is that luck played a major role in their survival. If a child happened to wake up alive for a thousand or more mornings in a row, they became survivors.

  Despite it all, and whatever their private battles, the hidden children survivors have been unusually attuned to the suffering of others.

  In 1990 Sophie was on a committee for cancer services at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island. Committee meetings were not her thing; treating cancer patients was. Usually she sat far in the back of the room at these meetings.

  “Any other business?” the hospital committee chair asked as things wound down.

  Sophie, who’d always had a major aversion to public speaking—in a sense, she needed to stay hidden—suddenly raised her hand and asked, “Why don’t we do something for cancer survivors?”

  The first National Cancer Survivors Day had been held a couple of years before, but North Shore Community didn’t have an event, and Sophie realized it should. Sophie’s patients were in a life-and-death struggle against a killer as cruel and capricious as the Holocaust. She wanted to celebrate them, celebrate with them, and to supply some hope.

  The hospital’s CEO happened to be walking by, heard Sophie’s question, stopped, and said, “What a great idea!”

  Before she knew it, Sophie, who had always hid from group activities, was heading up a planning committee. All the networking, organizing, and decision making was stressful, but along the way she realized that she wanted to include all cancer survivors who had been treated at North Shore Community over the years, not just the ones currently under her care. That meant identifying the still living, creating and sending out invitations to what looked more and more like a party to be held outside, with tents and balloons and music.

  It was scheduled for June 1991, by which time Sophie had just had the profound experience of attending the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II in Manhattan. She therefore knew firsthand how important it was to meet people in similar circumstances, how powerful it was to be among other survivors with whom you didn’t have to say a word in order to know what they had been through.

  The event was a big success, involving over 600 cancer survivors and their families. Oncology patients were suddenly transformed into excellent conversationalists and virtuosos on the dance floor. Many of them, patients past and present, made sure Sophie knew they were there. With the hidden children’s Christian hiding parents in mind, Sophie took pains to have some of the patients get up and honor their caregivers as well.

  The hospital adopted Cancer Survivors Day immediately as an annual event, using a videotape of it as a marketing tool. For Sophie, the Cancer Survivors Day represented a personal milestone, the discovery that she could nurture a question she had asked on the spur of the moment one year into an actual event with far-reaching benefits the next. For the first time in her life, she felt she was going to leave something very important behind (after her two sons, of course, and grandchildren), and it helped quiet the guilt felt by all hidden children—why did I survive the Holocaust and not the others?

  In her retirement, as a representative of the International Federation of University Women to the United Nations, Sophie attends, among others, meetings of human rights experts on genocide prevention. When she hears about atrocities in various countries, she is enraged that she still lives in a world where genocide occurs regularly, but feels that part of her personal role is to remind others that genocide didn’t begin with Bosnia and Rwanda. There are people in many countries who have never heard of the Final Solution. At one UN meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, when the chairperson asked everyone to introduce themselves, Sophie did something she never would have done just a couple of years before. She overcame her lingering unease about her own place in history and said that she was a survivor of the European genocide called the Holocaust.

  The Hidden Child Foundation was established immediately after the 1991 Gathering, and Carla Lessing became one of its vice presidents. More than twenty years later, she still takes the train into Manhattan every Wednesday to the office of the Hidden Child Foundation. Her tasks range from event planning, to details like tracking down billing code numbers and vetting a package on its way to Yad Vashem, or seeing about getting a member’s hiding parents posthumously inducted into the Righteous Among the Nations. There is also the mail. When the Hidden Child newsletter is mailed out, a lot of them come back: Address Unknown, Undeliverable Address, Return to Sender. Carla moves files from Active to Moved, more and more often to Deceased.

  And there are the phone calls. When elderly hidden children call for financial or emotional assistance during the Jewish holidays, Carla refers them to family service agencies. Many callers live isolated lives far from a community of other hidden children, feeling no less alone than they did seventy years ago, hidden behind a strange family’s bookcase. She often fields “second-generation calls”—distress calls from the children of hidden children, saying that their mother’s acting strangely, or their father’s being aggressive.

  The calls she likes least, though, are the
occasional ones from a hidden child’s child, complaining that his or her aged mother is now saying that she was sexually abused during the war.

  It is the next circle of the Holocaust survivor’s hell, the trauma so perverse and inconceivable that most of its victims dare speak about it only in old age.

  If you Google “sexual abuse of hidden children” you’ll find only an article on jspace.com, a brief reference to it on jewishvirtuallibrary.org, another passing mention in the script for a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit about hidden children in 2003 to 2004, and a link to a 2012 article by Carla Lessing in Kavod, an online journal for mental health professionals working with Holocaust survivors. Carla’s article, “Aging Child Holocaust Survivors of Sexual Abuse,” begins bluntly: “The goal of this presentation is that we, the mental health professionals and caretakers of the now elderly victims, will be alert to the possibility that the aging former hidden children, men, and women were molested in hiding and have never spoken about it.”

  This is not news within the hidden child community. Back in 1990, a year before the Gathering, a paper by Sarah Moskowitz and Robert Kress in the Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences claimed that one in six hidden children had been sexually abused. A subsequent study in the Netherlands estimated that more than 80 percent of hidden children interviewed were treated well, while 15 percent were occasionally mistreated, and some 5 percent were treated badly. But any percent is too many. As British Holocaust historian Zoe Waxman wrote in 2010, “Until relatively recently, rape and sexual abuse has remained an untold chapter in the history of the Holocaust. This stems from both the cultural taboo and also because such experiences are not considered to be a part of the narrative of the Holocaust.”

  In its mockery of all decency and morality, in its profound betrayal of a child’s desperate trust, the sexual abuse of hidden children by their benefactors is almost as incomprehensible as the Final Solution itself. Given the standard of inhumanity set by the Third Reich, the sexual abuse of hidden children can surprise us only because it is the one atrocity that hasn’t really come to light after all these years.

  Incest under any circumstances, as Australian psychiatrist Paul Valent said in a 1995 talk about his challenging treatment of a sexually abused hidden child, “ultimately breaks down the meaning of one’s life. To be aware that one is abused and perverted by one’s caretakers, to realize that the supposed provider of law and order is immoral and perverse, to be totally powerless and, in spite of everything, to be forced to seek their love even as they are destroying one’s life and soul is too hard to do for a child, and if they did they would die or wish to die.” For hidden children, “the triple trauma of separation, persecution, and sexual abuse,” as Carla puts it, is a double-bind cinched even tighter. “They cannot reconcile the feelings of having been saved from death by their saviors, and concomitantly, abused by them while in their care.”

  While the extent of the problem will never be known, the largest study conducted to date on the sexual abuse of hidden children contains even more disturbing news. In-depth, voluntary interviews with twenty-two sexually abused former hidden children, fourteen men and eight women, found that 60 percent were abused by their hiding parents or other Christians who knew their identity, 12 percent were abused by their foster siblings, and 28 percent had been abused by their biological parents or another male Jew. While a Jewish parent might be disturbed enough under normal circumstances to sexually abuse his or her own child, the extraordinarily stressful, prolonged, and confined conditions imposed by the Holocaust on hidden Jewish families might well account for most, if not all, of these cases. Perhaps not surprisingly, victims’ attitudes toward Jewish perpetrators was more clearly negative than abused children’s attitudes toward their non-Jewish abusers. Moreover, 27 percent of all perpetrators were females. Finally, the study found that three-quarters of the victims, despite their later success in life and in raising families, did not think life was worth living.

  “Yes, I did well in business,” one participant told his interviewer. “I also have a loving wife; without her I could not have survived. . . . But is my life worth living? No. Every morning for as long as I can remember, I hoped that I would not be able to open my eyes. . . . I wanted to be dead. . . . Life is not worth living!”

  According to Valent, who has treated three hidden children abused by their non-Jewish foster parents, the abuse was “most likely stimulated by the total availability of a helpless dependent child who was not a blood relative. Maybe the abusers justified it by feeling ‘We’ve put ourselves at risk for you, and you owe us.’” Therapists who remain even slightly uncertain about the reports of their hidden child patients run a huge risk, according to Valent. “Even being open-minded,” he has said, “saying I don’t know what happened, but I do believe that you believe it happened, is experienced as an invalidation, like someone saying, I don’t know if the Holocaust happened, but I do believe you think it did.”

  If sexual abuse hasn’t been part of hidden children’s public narratives until recently—long after sexual abuse of children had become a well-publicized and much-reported issue—one reason must be that the abuse was often buried beneath other trauma that resisted consciousness. It had to wait its turn. The 1991 Gathering, Carla writes, “gave survivors of hiding the essential support and permission to come out of hiding and talk more freely to each other. But there were those who only told a part of their story and left out the cruel violation they endured in hiding. Another ten years went by before the community of hidden children openly acknowledged that many children in hiding had been sexually and physically abused.”

  As child survivors get older, Valent writes, “Past means of coping such as looking to the future and cutting off feelings and memories no longer have survival value, and negate developmental drives to make sense and generate wisdom. Paradoxically and often surprisingly to survivors, memories that return into awareness for processing bring the past closer than it had been for many years.”

  But whether memories of having been sexually abused were simply repressed until now, whether victims withheld the information until they felt their loved ones would not be so burdened by it, or whether children of survivors were simply afraid to ask, for fear their mothers had been raped, the recall of sexual abuse in hiding brings not only great pain, but acknowledging it can also threaten to undo the trust in others so carefully rebuilt over the years.

  One of Valent’s patients, “Anne,” told him about her hiding father’s regular invitations to join him in his bed: “I did not know all this was wrong, because a child has to be told something is wrong to know it is wrong. Obviously I did not respond well, because he always became angry, angrier and more violent each time. I had bruises everywhere. I was blue.” “Anne” may not have known it was wrong, but she knew it wasn’t right. “And when I mentioned to the lady of the house something of what was going on,” she told Valent, “she called me a liar, opened the wall oven and said she would throw me in there if I lied again.”

  She was eight.

  KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

  Sophie is back in the city now, a very active widow in her seventies, living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from where she first landed in New York City. She has two sons and two grandchildren.

  Carla and Ed Lessing are both in their eighties, but they have the air and energy of people twenty years younger. They have a son and a daughter and four grandchildren.

  Flora also seems younger than her years. Like Carla, she still sees psychotherapy patients, but she has started a second career as “a perfectly imperfect photographer” who uses reflections in her photos to express her double life. In the spring of 2013, she had her first exhibit at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village and another one in the Catskills in 2014. For more than thirty years, she has lived with her Japanese companion in a building less than half a mile from Flora’s first apartment in 1959. Flora and Sophie continue to be close.

/>   The hidden children survivors are all senior citizens now, many with children and grandchildren. For many of the children of hidden child survivors—“2Gs” they call themselves, for “second generation”—the Holocaust burns brightly. In October 2012, at the annual conference of the World Federation of Holocaust Child Survivors and Their Descendants, fifty children of these hidden child survivors gathered in a meeting room of the Cleveland Renaissance Hotel. More and more come to these conferences, both to honor their parents and to find comfort for the pain that their parents’ experiences have inflicted on them. While a few 2Gs in the group were reticent, many had a hard time containing themselves. Bursting with the need to testify about their parents’ suffering, they rattled off towns, dates, relatives, and losses until the recitation of atrocities became numbing.

  After an hour and a half of “introductions,” the leader had to cut off a few of the well-rehearsed accounts. The group had already heard about the mother who was on the first train to Auschwitz and survived four camps while her entire family perished. The mother whose immediate family was all killed before a priest hid her. The mother who thought she’d lost all seven brothers and sisters, only to find one of those brothers many years later. The woman pulled alive from a mass grave by a Russian soldier who later became her uncle. The parent who was the only survivor of the Katyn massacre. The parents who were married before the war, then separated at Auschwitz, and reunited after.

  It’s in rooms like this, not in books, that the human toll of history is most intimately felt. The present never seemed so tightly and hauntingly bound to the collective past than when it was the turn for the son and daughter of a Dutch survivor to speak. Their mother, they said, had been at the birthday party in Amsterdam for a girl named Anne Frank, where her father gave her a present: a diary with a red-and-white plaid cover.

  Through the 2Gs, and increasingly the 3Gs—“the designated candles,” some call them—the ugly history simmers. Through the survivors’ books, the particulars are recorded for posterity. Elsewhere in the hotel, a long table offers a sampling of melancholy titles: While Other Children Played, Against All Odds, Denied Entry, How We Survived, Chased by Demons, Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust, Amidst the Shadows of Trees, Bitter Freedom, No Time to Mourn, I Have My Mother’s Eyes. Open any one of them and you’re in a secret passageway that leads to the malevolence that not even a survivor’s own words can adequately express.