‘Phantom Siblings’ : Bond Unites Children of Holocaust

For Hanukkah, they met in a Beverly Hills condominium and quarreled over when to serve the food.

For Passover, they met in a downtown office building and debated how many prayers to read.

These were merely family tensions, the kind that rise and as quickly collapse among people who have lived a lifetime together.

The difference is that these people have known each other only a short time. They call themselves the “phantom siblings” because they feel like the family that they have all done without for 40 years.

Most of them lost their real siblings, as well as parents and other relatives, when they were children.

Managed to Survive

They were among the small group of European-born Jewish children who passed the Nazi persecution in hiding or in concentration camps and managed to survive.

After the war, they moved to new lands and quickly disappeared from sight, remaining uncounted, unstudied and unaware of one another until they were drawn together recently, almost by chance.

Their union happened when they were assembled for a research project. On the day they met, they felt an immediate and irresistible attraction.

“It was like finding a bunch of brothers and sisters I should always have had,” said Natalie Gold, one of the group.

Their experience has inspired similar groups to form in several Eastern cities in an incipient movement that has been received support from a surge of interest among Holocaust researchers.

Not Mentioned

As late as 1974, the literature of the Holocaust contained almost nothing on the children who escaped Nazi persecution, said Bonnie Gurewitsch, archivist for the Center for Holocaust Studies in New York.

Although the center has been focusing on that subject to try to fill the gap of knowledge, there remains no accurate count of the Jewish children who survived the war in hiding and there probably never will be, Gurewitsch said.

Countless Jewish children placed in convents and Christian families during the war never returned to Judaism, she said, and even those who were reunited with Jewish families were seldom sought out by historians.

“Researchers go to primary material,” Gurewitsch said. “There is a tendency to go to the leadership, well-known people. Children were obviously not in the leadership . . . and often they did not have any relevant historical data to provide.”

And seldom did they force the issue.

“These children who came here as young teen-agers wanted nothing more than to assimilate into the new society,” Gurewitsch said. “And, in many cases, they completely succeeded.”

The scarcity of literature on the child survivors became apparent to Sarah Moskovitz, a professor of early childhood development at California State University, Northridge, during research for a book, “Love Despite Hate,” in which she examined the adult lives of children raised in an English orphanage for survivors of concentration camps.

Moskovitz could find nothing solid to suggest how the child survivors fared in adult life.

“There was even talk that there weren’t any or that they were all psychotic,” Moskovitz said. “The prediction was that anyone who grows up after such trauma in childhood will be delinquent, psychotic, will not be able to make relationships.”

Moskovitz found a handful of Los Angeles Jews who are generally 45 to 55 years old, well educated, successful in careers, and apparently well-adjusted emotionally. Yet she found in most of them a common thread of emotional pain. All shared an intense feeling of isolation, of somehow not belonging.

Few knew any other child survivors. Few had ever discussed their childhood experiences outside their immediate families.

Difficult to Discuss

Some even found it difficult to talk to their parents about it.

Gold, for example, who spent the war in a convent, said her father quickly remarried after the war and would not admit that her real mother had died.

“Because they really wanted to protect me, they said, ‘You didn’t know what was happening, you were just a kid,’ ” Gold said. “When he married this woman, he kind of pretended, ‘She’s (her real mother) come back.’ Since I knew this was important to my father and he was important to me, I played along with this collusion.”

For Gold and about 35 others, the silence ended unexpectedly on a spring afternoon in 1983 when Moskovitz called them together.

“We talked together and understood each other the way no one had before,” said Dana Schwartz, a Beverly Hills psychologist who spent the war in hiding. “It’s like a shorthand. We know everything about each other. We understood what it felt like to hide and what it felt like to be thought of as vermin, something to be destroyed, deleted from the world.”

Conducted Interviews

Over the next several months, Moskovitz video-taped about two dozen 90-minute interviews.

The tapes, on file at the Cal State Northridge Instructional Media Center, are diverse in content and dramatic impact. A sampling of the stories illustrates a common theme of psychological fear, confusion, loss of roots and family disarray in childhood. Yet, contrary to the preconception of “delinquent, psychotic” lives, all the subjects show surprising emotional strength and a sense of duty in their adult lives.

- Daisy Miller--Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, fled with her family to Italy and, in 1943, went into hiding with a succession of peasant families, living in underground hovels and attics with blankets over the windows.

At one house, she said, “I was allowed to spend time in the kitchen with the family at night. One evening there was a knock at the door. This person came in. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. I think I might have died a little that day. I had been told not to be seen. Here I had done this to my parents.”

After the war, her father having died and her sister married in Italy, Miller and her mother emigrated to the United States. She learned English at Public School 165 in New York City and, later moving to Los Angeles, she became simply a New Yorker to most of her friends. Miller became active in social causes in the 1970s. She founded Better Valley Services, a private organization that assists people with county services in the San Fernando Valley. Today she is a retirement planning consultant and lives with her second husband in the Hollywood Hills.

- Gertrude Hill--Born in Hungary, was transported with her mother from home at age 13, two weeks after her father was taken away in 1944. After a cattle car trip to Auschwitz, she was accosted on the loading dock by a capo, a collaborating Jew, who knew that a mother with a dependent would be killed.

“Don’t say to anyone that this is your mother,” he said. “Stay clear. You are not a child anymore.”

For five months, she stayed near her mother, but never beside her. They made a point of touching each other every night when it was dark in the barracks.

One day a baby was born and killed by the women so that the abusive female capo assigned to their barracks would not turn the mother in.

“Someone handed me something dirty and messy and mushy in my hands and said, ‘Bury it,’ ” Hill said.

Feared for Life

She was caught doing it by the capo and feared for her life.

“She said, ‘Scram, schnell, schnell ,” Hill said. “That was the turning point about that capo. I used to hate her. I thought she was an animal. At this point, I began to love her.”

Hill and her mother were liberated on April 14, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen.

“I declared myself stateless,” Hill said. “I didn’t want to go back to a place that expelled me.”

Today, Hill is a Beverly Hills psychologist specializing in gender dysphoria.

- Alex Radziner--Born in Amsterdam in 1940, he was taken from his home by Nazis but was spirited out of a holding center on a ruse. A friend of his father’s who was married to a Gentile asserted his right to leave because he had a non-Jewish child.

“The man says, ‘My son is not Jewish.’ He pulled me out and that’s it. I never saw my parents again.” Radziner said, breaking into tears. “Gosh, I didn’t know this was going to be so bad.”

The underground placed him with a rural Christian family and he spent the next 2 1/2 years posing as “a cousin from the city.” He formed an attachment to the family. He became a practicing Christian, but never forgot who he was.

“At night I would softly whisper Jewish songs because I didn’t want to forget them,” Radziner said.

“Would you sing one?” Moskovitz asked Radziner.

‘I Would Break Down’

“I would not want to do that,” he said. “I would break down completely.”

After the war, Radziner followed his Christian family, who had emigrated to Los Angeles. Except for a sister who married in Amsterdam, his family was dead.

“Everything in the town (Amsterdam) reminded you of people who weren’t there,” he said.

Today, a production manager in a garment factory, he still visits his Christian family and thinks of them as his second set of parents.

For all their differences, the stories all ended the same way, with 40 years of self-imposed silence. Sometimes it even extended into marriage and child-rearing.

“Nobody seemed interested,” Hill said. “I didn’t think it was fair to impose these things on other people. I said to my children when they were a little older that if they ever had any questions about my concentration camp experiences, I would be willing to talk to them about it. But nobody asked me any questions and I let it be.”

Aching to Talk

By the time Moskovitz assembled the small group at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, many among them were aching to break the silence.

Some even felt that because of the incredible odds they had survived, they had a destiny to speak.

“I feel I have something to say that dies with me and I think it is important to get it out before it is too late,” Miller said.

Once Moskovitz brought them into contact, they immediately solidified as a group and began searching for others. Their group now has grown to about 150.

Still other candidates have shunned the group.

“Some child survivors still have difficulty in acknowledging all this and thinking about it,” Miller said. “Any notion of bringing this up to the surface is something they don’t want to do.”

Celebrate Together

As many as 60, however, continue to meet monthly and to celebrate Jewish holidays together. Many have gone through group sessions to share their recollections.

Last fall, inspired by a speech given by Schwartz at a conference in Philadelphia on the Holocaust, child survivors formed about a dozen other groups in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Boston, said Judith Kestenberg of the Jerome Ryker International Study of Organized Persecution of Children.

Kestenberg, a New York psychiatrist, has put together a team of several dozen volunteer researchers in Europe and America that is conducting the first systematic survey of children who survived the Holocaust.

Interviews to date have produced the conclusion that child survivors in the United States have stronger feelings of alienation than those who remained to their native countries, Kestenberg said.

‘I Am Finally Accepted’

“It is astounding how in all these groups, the topics are very similar,” she said. “In almost every group there is that feeling of exhilaration that, ‘I am finally accepted.’ ”

In the Los Angeles group, meanwhile, the first flush of excitement may have faded somewhat and with it the need to dwell on the past.

“We have decided, and more so as time goes on, to make these reunions joyous and pleasant, instead of recounting the hideous experiences,” Hill said.

But the need to spend time together has not faded and some in the group think it never will.

“I don’t think we have much in common in many ways,” Miller said. “We come from very diverse walks of life. And yet we have this strange warmth and closeness which transcends all the other stuff.”

‘I feel I have something to say that dies with me and I think it is important to get it out before it is too late.’--Daisy Miller