The Holocaust as Active Memory

The Past in the Present

Irene Levin, Marie Louise Seeberg, Irene Levin, Claudia Lenz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367601621
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317028659
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ways in which memories of the Holocaust have been communicated, represented and used have changed dramatically over the years. From such memories being neglected and silenced in most of Europe until the 1970s, each country has subsequently gone through a process of cultural, political and pedagogical awareness-rising. This culminated in the 'Stockholm conference on Holocaust commemoration' in 2000, which resulted in the constitution of a task force dedicated to transmitting and teaching knowledge and awareness about the Holocaust on a global scale. The silence surrounding private memories of the Holocaust has also been challenged in many families. What are the catalysts that trigger a change from silence to discussion of the Holocaust? What happens when we talk its invisibility away? How are memories of the Holocaust reflected in different social environments? Who asks questions about memories of the Holocaust, and which answers do they find, at which point in time and from which past and present positions related to their societies and to the phenomenon in question? This book highlights the contexts in which such questions are asked. By introducing the concept of 'active memory', this book contributes to recent developments in memory studies, where memory is increasingly viewed not in isolation but as a dynamic and relational part of human lives.

Chapter 1
Linking Religion and Family: Memories of Children Hidden in Belgian Convents during the Holocaust

Suzanne Vromen

Introduction: the Historical Context

On the eve of the Nazi invasion in May 1940, Belgium was essentially a Catholic country. It counted about 13,000 priests and 50,000 nuns, a gender imbalance partially explained by the limited career opportunities available to women at the time. Many Catholic organizations served adults and youth and the country had an extended network of Catholic elementary and secondary schools. Orphanages, health and elder care were mainly the Church’s responsibility. Because of its extensive impact on public life, the Nazis did not disrupt Church functions. In fact, it was the only institution to remain untouched by the occupation. Many Jews, therefore, sought its protection against the Nazi terror and violence. While the higher clergy remained to a certain extent passive bystanders, in contrast it was the lower clergy – parish priests and nuns – who spontaneously extended their help.

Research Focus and Data

The focus of my research was to investigate how the ex-hidden children interpret today their experiences in the religious environments into which they were suddenly plunged during the war. I examined all facets of their lives in the convents, but in this chapter I will mainly consider the linkages the children created between their families and their newly acquired religion. Secondly, I will briefly show how after the war the memories of the hidden children were silenced both within their families and in the larger social context. The concept of ‘the hidden children’ and the collective memory it produced and shaped emerged nearly half a century after the end of the war.

My research is based on lengthy unstructured interviews with a snowball sample of 16 women and 12 men who were hidden in Belgian convents during the Holocaust. Most were between 7 and 12 years old when they were separated from their parents in order to be hidden. I also interviewed eight surviving nuns and one priest who were involved in sheltering Jewish children. Though I searched for more surviving priests I could not find others. Nuns have rarely been interviewed about what they remember from their wartime experiences. To me, however, their voices seemed indispensable. To complete the picture and to find out how the resistance functioned I interviewed two surviving members of the resistance who were responsible for escorting children from their homes to the convents.1

Hidden Children’s Diverse Attitudes Towards Catholicism and Relationships with Nuns and Priests

The interviews showed that the children believed the separation from their parents was a temporary one. They were not alone in that belief. Because the Nazis were adept at hiding their ultimate deathly aims, deportations were widely viewed as brutal round-ups for forced labor ‘in the East’ and not for extermination. Even though the children lived in the expectation of their parents’ return, the seductive convent socialization shaped by intense rituals led the children to frame the memories of their families through their newly-acquired Catholicism in a variety of ways. In a sense, it was as if the children introduced their parents into the convents. For some, the imagined presence of their parents resulted in resisting conversion; others espoused their new religion with great devotion and enthusiasm and integrated their parents into it. The attitudes to baptism and conversion varied on a continuum from total resistance to total acceptance. Let me illustrate this continuum with quotes from the interviews.

As an example of total rejection, an interviewee said: ‘It was difficult to go to Mass every day, it was an unbearable chore every day, all this religion was boring and unpleasant’ (Vromen 2008: 14).

The interviews also provided narratives of resistance that occurred with the help of a sibling:

Each time they tried to convert me I said: ‘Ask my sister, I will do what my sister decides.’ My sister who was fifteen years old knew very well what she wanted. She told the nuns: “I promised my parents that we would not convert. I will convert when my parents return. During the time my parents are deported I have promised to stay Jewish, but when they come back I will convert.” This way she was left alone (Vromen 2008: 16).

The reaction is particularly poignant because it illustrates not only steadfast resistance to Catholic socialization, but also the mistaken, but common belief, that deportation did not mean extermination. The strong influence of siblings is clearly illustrated in another interview:

I had asked the nuns to baptize me, and they refused. “Only if your parents agree”, they said. I had been dazzled by the Catholic religion … When my brother and sister joined me in the convent, I was so enthused by that religion that I wanted them to share my happiness. So I told them immediately: “You know there is a god, called Jesus, and he wanted to sacrifice himself for us, and he died on the cross for us.” My sister looked at me and, without a moment’s hesitation, declared: “If you continue to say such nonsense, Dad will laugh at you.” My faith was immediately shattered into a thousand pieces… . It broke at my feet. I really heard it breaking like crystal. (Vromen 2008: 17)

That the presence of siblings seemed to have encouraged resistance to Catholic socialization is understandable. In the presence of a witness to one’s past, it was easier to maintain one’s convictions and to feel both protected and strengthened by a sense of familial solidarity.

Children also knew how to manipulate parents. The nuns in the convent of one of my interviewees demanded that she first receive her parents’ permission to be baptized. She said: ‘I asked only my father because I knew that he was more open-minded. You know, children feel that, and my father said: “Why not?” I never dared tell my mother …’ (Vromen 2008: 17). Her mother was told about it much later and felt greatly hurt.

Religious instruction introduced the children to the notion of sacrifice. In personalizing this notion, they bargained with God: perhaps in exchange for their sacrifice God would spare their parents from harm. Renée decided to stop eating so that: ‘Dad would come back’ (Vromen 2008: 21). Monique walked intentionally on thorns to replicate the suffering of Jesus, and sewed a dozen holy medals in the lining of her father’s suit to protect him. Henriette forced herself to eat more of the dried cod, which she disliked intensely. She hoped that, in divine recognition of her sacrifice, her parents would be safe. The children brought their parents spiritually into the convents, as silent witnesses. This was even more palpable when siblings were hidden together.

Catholic socialization could have a strong effect. According to their own accounts some children wanted to be baptized. They found their new religion comforting, warm, hopeful, an oasis of spirituality in a world gone mad and rendered incomprehensible. They cherished crosses, rosaries, prayer books and holy images. They embraced the rituals with little difficulty and found solace in them. They looked for and sought their mother when they contemplated and prayed to the Virgin Mary. They prayed to her with devotion for the safe return of their families. In one account, when a daughter met her mother just returned from Auschwitz, her first words to her mother were: ‘Now you come to the chapel to thank the Virgin Mary for saving you’ (Vromen 2008: 23). And for the first and last time in her life, this mother went to the chapel.

The Catholic institutions offered very different milieux. They differed in their resources, wealth, and practices. The hidden children’s relationships with the nuns and priests varied also. The strangely-dressed beings that the children encountered had to be addressed as Sisters or Mothers or Fathers. Feelings towards these beings ranged between two poles, from love and admiration to virulent hate, from ‘angel’ to ‘bitch on wheels’ as an interviewee expressed it. Many of the children were searching for the parental affection they had recently lost. Toward those nuns who lavished maternal feelings on their needy new charges the youngsters sometimes expressed the same emotions they had for their parents. On the other hand, they hated the strict disciplinarians, heatedly recalled anti-Semitic incidents and struggled with experiences of intense cruelty.

The maternal feelings of the nuns took different forms. A male interviewee remembers:

Sister Madeleine was a nurse, and I will not forget her. She loved the children very much. I remember one day I had to undress because I had boils, and I was very much ashamed. I was afraid that she should see that I am Jewish. She told me: “You can undress and you have nothing to fear from me.” I adored her. Not only I, all the children. They all wanted to be examined by her. (Vromen 2008: 30)

The nun’s caring attitude and reassurance went beyond her professional duties. The infirmary was a place in which each child was seen as an individual, a luxury in a life lived in a collective context, so the opportunity for visits was eagerly seized.

Another interviewee remembers:

Sister Clotilde asked me how to say in Yiddish “sleep well my child”, and I told her that it was “Schloof git mein kind”. Once a month when the Gentile children had visitors who brought them goodies, Sister Clotilde would lean close to my ear when we were all in bed, she would whisper “Schloof git mein kind” and would slip a piece of candy in my mouth. I suppose that she did that to the other Jewish kids, and apparently knew who they were. While I enjoyed the candy melting in my mouth, my heart enjoyed her tender loving care. (Vromen 2008: 32)

Sister Clotilde was certainly maternal in alleviating the marginality of Jewish children. She knew how to comfort by using familiar and familial language. Her timing was perfect: night was when the children were most vulnerable to homesickness.

Isaac remembered the heartache after his mother’s sole visit:

My mother came to see us once, bringing a cake. Sister Marguerite said “This is for Sunday.” We never received that cake. I don’t know where it disappeared, but we never ate it. I remember this very clearly. It is a feeling of frustration that has remained with me. (Vromen 2008: 33)

With wartime shortages, a cake was an extraordinary luxury. It required much effort to provide it, and his mother risked her safety in bringing it to the convent. The cake represented what his mother meant to him, it was her gift of love to him and his brothers. He remembered the frustration so strongly because he had been doubly betrayed – denied the rare pleasure of delicious food and deprived of the precious token of his mother’s love. The nun’s greedy act, seemingly inconsequential, inflicted a wound still vividly remembered after more than half a century.

Charles developed a special relationship with his college principal. The man became a father figure for him:

When others would leave for home visits I had to remain in school. He would call me into his office and we would chat. We had such affection for each other. I think he would have liked to have me as his son. I would have liked to have him as a father. (Vromen 2008: 34)

Clearly, in recalling their experiences in Catholic institutions the ex-hidden children framed many of them through the prism of family relationships. Anxious about their parents’ fate, some found solace in their new religion, while siblings hidden together supported each other and seemed to offer more resistance to baptism and conversion.

Explanation of Linkages of Religion and Family through Theories of Rituals

Examining characteristics and functions of rituals may help to explain how some of the children created linkages between their newly acquired religion and their families and how they came to imagine their parents’ presence in the convents as silent witnesses.

Barbara Myerhoff has argued that where there is uncertainty and anxiety rituals provide predictability through repetition (Myerhoff 1996: 395). They communicate not only predictability but simultaneously order and continuity. These were valuable qualities for Jewish children, persecuted, stigmatized and abruptly torn from their families. After these children found refuge in the convents from a threatening and chaotic world, rituals could soothe their fears and re-establish some stability and regularity.

As Emile Durkheim and after him Victor Turner have noted, rituals affirm community unity and through them individuals learn the behavior and appropriate the norms that will shape them and grant them full membership in this community (Bell 1996: 22). Plunged suddenly into an entirely new environment, some of my interviewees often recalled their intense desire to belong and to be embraced by the community, for instance through baptism and communion. One of them expressed it well. Speaking of being baptized relatively early during the war, he emphasized the sense of emotional security he acquired by becoming part of the majority:

Yes, I was Jewish, but what did it mean at the age of nine? On the other hand, everyday life was Catholic. It represented an acceptance by a totality, an insertion into a majority. It meant not being a black sheep left on the margin. (Vromen 2008: 19)

He then described to me the profound impression Catholic rituals left on him even after the end of the war, as they provided him with a secure emotional anchor. But that was not their only function.

Many researchers have argued that rituals also incorporate action and performance. It is through rituals that individuals talk directly to the powers, invoke and confront them. In doing so they integrate thought and action, enhance their sense of self and arouse emotions. Rituals are ways of acting in the world; they empower those following them to exercise their agency. Not only do rituals bind people to each other, but through active participation and communion with transcendent beings individuals increase their sense of responsibility. This was clearly illustrated when the children were exposed to the concept of sacrifice and used it to benefit their parents. Bargaining with God for their parents’ lives, they exercised their sense of responsibility to ensure their parents’ safety. They did what they judged necessary to influence the powerful divinity, and they acted with the understanding that it was up to them to intercede so as to bestow on their parents the gift of life. In their thoughts and prayers they felt responsible for rescuing their parents and bringing them to the place where they themselves were safe. The important point is that by enacting the rituals the children were not passive: they generated bargaining actions that they hoped would be effective, for example as mentioned previously, walking on thorns, fasting, overcoming dislikes, and sewing holy medals. They intervened and engaged with God and the Holy Trinity whom they considered all powerful.

In a sense, through rituals the children also engaged themselves outside of ordinary time. As Barbara Myerhoff and David Kertzer argue, rituals connect the past, the present and the future to each other (Myerhoff 1996: 409–10, Kertzer 1996: 340). Characterized by continuity, they provide hope for the future. They reassure and give self-confidence because paradoxically they include fixed features and yet are timeless. ‘The most effective rituals have an emotionally compelling quality to them, they involve the whole personality’ (Kertzer 1996: 346), and Catholic rituals certainly did that. But there is more at stake. Emotions are at their highest when people engage in rituals as they face anxiety, fears and uncertainty. Under difficult circumstances the ritual’s message becomes emotionally gripping, undeniable and convincing. Rituals make clear and palpable what is wished for, and ‘as Geertz has observed the lived-in-order merges with the dreamed-of-order’ (Myerhoff 1996: 395). The circumstances in the children’s lives certainly support this interpretation.

While rituals certainly linked the children to the convent community, clearly they also bound them to a wider collectivity, in this case their families, the only collectivity most of them had formerly known. And in Myerhoff’s words again, in ritual there is ‘a return to Paradise’, which for the children signified their parents (Myerhoff 1996: 395). Everyday life demanded that the hidden children abrogate their past. As soon as they were separated from their parents they were required to forget their former names, their former lives, in certain cases their former language, they had to flip into an entirely different identity and silence their past. Their engagement with rituals relieved these difficult circumstances. It created for the children an intense personal experience that allowed them to return to their past and to their earliest states of being, and permitted them to relive events with profoundly emotional association. With that continuity of self, they retrieved their family experiences not as past memories but as events and feelings in the present. The past and the present were fused.

Given the power and ability of rituals to provide solace and hope, to which may be added desire for conformity and for integration into a collectivity, it is not at all surprising that some hidden children became fervent Catholics and integrated their families in their newly found religion. Some also integrated their Judaism with their Catholicism. One interviewee illustrated this very cogently. He sang in the choir and he loved the hymn that began ‘Laudam Jerusalem’ (Let me praise Jerusalem). He explained:

This Jerusalem – I integrated it into my early religious upbringing. I integrated Jesus, the Apostles – these were Jews – and the Virgin. I integrated them all in my religion, and I accepted them rather fast. I recited the Rosary with sincerity and I said “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” with conviction. I was addressing myself to those that were mine, who belonged to my people. I did not ask myself many questions, but I included all these persons in my faith. It was as if I were saying a Jewish prayer. (Vromen 2008: 22)

This quote illustrates well that the Paradise the boy was praying to fused in his mind what he had known with what he had newly learned. Through the rituals, the hidden children created for themselves this vivid sense of continuity. They linked what had been meaningful in their past – their families, their Judaism – to the present, and thereby maintained both their sense of self and their agency.

As noted previously, rituals paradoxically have fixed features yet are timeless. In the same paradoxical way, they are both particular and universal. The children had to learn the particulars of Catholic rituals and theology; they had to become familiar with the Holy Trinity and cardinal sins, genuflection and confession, countless aspects unknown to them in their pre-war lives. Yet in their search for meaning, some children found in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The Holocaust as Active Memory
• 1 Linking Religion and Family: Memories of Children Hidden in Belgian Convents during the Holocaust
• 2 Collective Trajectory and Generational Work in Families of Jewish Displaced Persons: Epistemological Processes in the Research Situation
• 3 In a Double Voice: Representations of the Holocaust in Polish Literature, 1980–2011
• 4 Winners Once a Year? How Russian-speaking Jews in Germany Make Sense of World War II and the Holocaust as Part of Transnational Biographic Experience
• 5 Women’s Peace Activism and the Holocaust: Reversing the Hegemonic Holocaust Discourse in Israel
• 6 ‘The History, the Papers, Let Me See It!’ Compensation Processes: The Second Generation between Archive Truth and Family Speculations
• 7 From Rescue to Escape in 1943: On a Path to De-victimizing the Danish Jews
• 8 Finland, the Vernichtungskrieg and the Holocaust
• 9 Swedish Rescue Operations during the Second World War: Accomplishments and Aftermath
• 10 The Social Phenomenon of Silence
• Index