Hidden Children: Forgotten Survivors of the Holocaust

Norman Ravvin’s novel, Café des Westens, won the Alberta Culture New
Fiction Award.

André Stein’s Hidden Children contains 10 stories of hiding and loss
drawn from the experiences of Jewish children under Nazi and
collaborationist rule. Stein interviewed each survivor and then reworked
their accounts into narratives that focus on the child’s view of
wartime hardship. He quotes his subjects liberally and adds his own
conclusions about how extreme difficulties in young people’s lives
affect their sense of themselves as adults.

Stein, who practices psychotherapy in Toronto, includes his own story
in Hidden Children. The impetus for the book seems to have been the
discovery, upon visiting a gathering of hidden children in New York in
1991, that a community of survivors existed whose experiences were
similar to his own.

A number of those interviewed point to the importance—both for
themselves and for the world at large—of their stories’ being told.
For the survivors themselves, this act of recounting their time spent in
hiding provides an antidote to the feelings of loss and guilt that haunt
them. Hidden Children demonstrates how the telling of oral history can
serve a therapeutic purpose, healing and educating as it confronts the
pain left by traumatic events.

Through these stories of hiding, the reader gains insight into a
widespread form of everyday resistance to which the Nazis’ victims
resorted, a response that is often ignored by conventional historical
studies and other forms of comment on the Holocaust. The stories Stein
has gathered help us view the responses of parents and children during
the war in their complexity and particularity, rather than through the
more stereotypical terms that are often presented in fictional or filmic
accounts of the war. As well, Hidden Children offers an intimate and
detailed account of the experience of the victims at a time when the
outlook and ideology of the perpetrators too often proves an
irresistible subject for readers and filmgoers.