Shoah's children speak

PAT JOHNSON

In 1945, the few remaining Jewish children of Europe emerged – some from camps, a larger number from convents and monasteries, attics and cellars, caves and forests, houses and farms.

"Genocidal murder demands the deliberate annihilation of children," Dr. Robert Krell said in a lecture at Beth Israel Synagogue Sunday, 70 years to the day after Kristallnacht. "And, as a result, one-and-a-half million Jewish children and adolescents were slaughtered."

Of the 20,000 Jews in The Hague when Krell was born in 1940, only 1,300 were alive when his parents came to retrieve him from his hiding place at age five. More than 90 per cent of Jewish children in Europe and 80 per cent of Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including all of Krell's grandparents, aunts and uncles. Both of Krell's parents miraculously survived, returning as near-strangers for the child who was hidden by a Christian family.

Krell, now a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, a clinical psychiatrist in child and family therapy and a founding member and longtime president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, was the keynote speaker Sunday night at the Annual Community Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture.

In introducing Krell, Prof. Chris Friedrichs, referred to the keynote lecturer as "one of the giants of our community." Friedrichs outlined Krell's remarkable life story as a Dutch Jewish child who survived in hiding from the age of two; a black-haired boy in a family of blonds, knowing only his Dutch Christian "Moeder" and "Vader," until his parents retrieved him.

Krell, who received from the packed sanctuary a thunderous ovation that contrasted sharply with the quiet profundity of the lecture, described how psychiatric research over the last six decades has approached the challenge of child survivors of the Holocaust. Krell's research combines his experiences as a hidden child with his work as a psychiatrist and a lifetime of leadership in the movement of and for child survivors.

The post-liberation experiences of children was dramatically different from that of adults, Krell explained, partly citing his own adjustment to life with his devastated family of origin.

"At age five, I discovered I was a Jew, whatever that meant," Krell said. "Then I began to learn what had happened to Jews. A few survivors returned and told their stories in our living room, in Yiddish."

As an eight-year-old cousin translated for the younger children, Krell said, "We heard stories no child should ever hear.

"We were children who escaped death but we did not escape being enveloped in death and grief and loss," he said.

Just seven per cent of Jewish children in Europe survived the Shoah to see liberation in 1945, Krell said. Only about 5,000 Jewish children emerged from the concentration camps. Another tiny remnant of a civilization's generation survived in hiding.

After the war, when most survivors sublimated their experiences to one degree or another, the youngest survivors faced a world unable, perhaps unwilling, to understand. There was an assumption among adult survivors that children's lack of comprehension spared them from the worst of the terror, an assumption Krell said was understandable, given that "survivors of the worst could not imagine a suffering comparable to theirs."

Krell continued, "What is more puzzling is the attitude of postwar mental health professionals.... There were few, if any, skilled interviewers to examine the children, listen to their experiences and guide them toward health."

He explained, "The vast majority lived in silence. Most were saved in hiding and so they remained. Hiding was difficult during the war, but easy after. Were children unwilling to talk of their experience after the war? It seems not. There were tellers. There were few listeners. So we lapsed into silence. We were used to silence. Silence became our language."

Unequipped to deal with the unspeakable experiences of these children, adults and psychiatric professionals encouraged child survivors to repress their memories.

"The older survivors, the adults who came to help and even the professionals colluded to tell the children to forget the past and get on with their lives," said Krell.

Even within the child survivor community, there was a dramatic difference in post-liberation experience and in the process of accommodating their past.

"The younger survivors had fewer memories, less of a Jewish identity, and were dispersed around the globe to those willing to accept them," Krell explained. "The adult survivors, those aged 17 and older at liberation ... somehow forged ahead, even in displaced persons camps, to start new families, to grieve and mourn and to emigrate and find work."

For orphaned young survivors, returning to their Jewish traditions meant different things, depending on age, and those who had been hidden with Christian families continue to feel a duality today.

"The older children, with some memory of Jewish tradition, had to lie about their origins in order to survive, but they also had something to retrieve after liberation," Krell said. "In my workshops, I have met Jewish children who may have become traditional or even observant Jews but who never miss a Christmas mass."

In Krell's case, he stayed in touch with his Dutch family, even after emigrating to Canada with his family of origin. His two sets of parents became friends, which was a geniality not experienced by all hidden children fortunate enough to have a parent return. After the war, some of these children were subjects of parental abductions, including instances of back-and-forth kidnappings.

The annual community lecture, co-sponsored by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and Beth Israel with the support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, commemorates the night in 1938 – Nov. 9-10 – when hundreds of synagogues across Germany and Austria were set ablaze, Jewish homes, businesses and property were destroyed, 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 incarcerated in concentration camps. The incident, which followed years of increasing legal and social proscriptions against Jews, is seen as the beginning in earnest of the Holocaust. The shattered glass of Jewish homes and businesses across Germany and Austria gave Kristallnacht its name.

To honor the memory of the six million Jewish victims murdered by the Nazis, six survivors were assisted by six young people to light candles of remembrance. Cantor Michael Zoosman, accompanied by Wendy Bross Stuart, sang El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer for the martyrs. Councillor Suzanne Anton, representing Mayor Sam Sullivan, read a proclamation from the city of Vancouver.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, managing director, programs and communications, for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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