COLUMN ONE : Breaking Silence on Hidden Past : Many Jewish children were raised as Christians to save them from the Holocaust. Now, they are talking of their guilt, grief and, for some, the struggle to figure out who they are.

For four years, as a child in wartime France, Marie Poll did not know that the man who slept in the cellar and sewed burlap sacks in the attic was her father.

“She is your second mother,” Anna Kaufman told her daughter, carefully using the feminine pronoun to describe her husband, Michael, lest the toddler start babbling in front of neighbors about her father or simply say, “he.”

“A single word could have meant the death of all of us,” Poll recalled. “That’s a big burden for a 4-year-old to carry. . . . Every day, I was reminded, ‘Don’t talk, don’t speak, be quiet.’ Every day, I was told, ‘If someone comes, go inside--don’t let him see you.’ I was to be silent and invisible.”

Poll was a “hidden child”--one of the thousands of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in Europe by pretending to be Christians. Some were left with family friends, some took refuge in convents and orphanages and others simply hid where they could.

But such survival--even while their parents, siblings and friends died in Nazi death camps--continues to exact a heavy psychological toll on most of them, and on their families.

“Even today, I keep thinking I shouldn’t be here--I should be dead,” said Ann Shore, president of the New York-based Hidden Child Foundation. “The guilt of having survived when 6 million of our people died is totally irrational but still very terrible.”

With much anguish and many tears, hundreds of the “hidden children,” now in their 50s and 60s, tried to come to grips with their memories at a recent conference in Jerusalem.

For some, it was the first time they had spoken openly about the years spent hiding in abandoned houses, barns, woods, convents, orphanages and even sewers, pretending to be Christian if they were older, not knowing they were Jewish if they were younger, and always fearing what the next day would bring.

“Finally, being able to speak about what happened to us is wonderfully therapeutic,” said Poll, 52, a clinical social worker in Los Angeles. “For years, I had a lot of fear that I would do something terrible--what, I didn’t know, but something terrible. And I didn’t know why I had this fear, even with a lot of therapy, until I met others who had been ‘hidden children’ and saw that they, too, were still carrying that burden.”

Some survivors remain almost schizophrenic, having been raised as Christians for years only to discover that they were Jewish.

“When the war was over and I was to return to the Jewish community, I didn’t want to go--Jews were ugly, dirty, smelly, did odd things and killed Christ,” Ruth Glickman said with a shudder of embarrassment. The 54-year-old Israeli lived with a Catholic family in Lithuania until she was 14. “I had turned into an anti-Semite, and my ‘Catholic mother’ had much trouble persuading me that Jews were really good people and I should rejoin my community. . . . It was years before I felt comfortable being Jewish.”

Abraham H. Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, was caught in a tug of war between his parents and the Lithuanian nanny who had raised him during the war as her son--and then wanted to keep him.

“She said I belonged to her and the Catholic Church,” said Foxman, 53, of New York. “If my parents had not survived the Holocaust and then succeeded in getting me back, I would probably be a parish priest somewhere in Poland.”

Shore, 64, an artist in New York, said that until recently, each “hidden child” thought his or her experience was unique and only marginally relevant to the Holocaust as a whole.

“We knew we were survivors of the Holocaust, but only now are we coming to understand who we really are and what we must do,” she said. “Part of what we need is coming to terms with our experiences and with who we are, and part is to share those experiences.”

For Foxman, the drive to share is crucially important--further testimony to the horror of the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews, a quarter of them children, were killed.

But it is also testimony to the compassion and courage of those Christians who tried to save Jews.

“We are the youngest of the Holocaust survivors,” Foxman said, “and we have a duty to testify as to the evil and the horror that it was and particularly to confront this vicious and hideous trend now of denying it happened.

“We also have a duty, too, to attest to the goodness, the compassion and the courage of people in the face of such evil. These people are heroes, true heroes, not only of the Jewish people but of Christianity and of Poland, of France, of Belgium, of Holland.”

The lesson, Foxman added, is that “you can make a difference. A good person--a moral person--can even in the face of the most unspeakable evil make a difference. Today, when we are confronted with Bosnia, with Somalia . . . with the Los Angeles ghettos, we should remember we can make a difference, we can save a life.”

The number of “hidden” children who survived the Holocaust is not known. The first conference organized by the Hidden Child Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League in New York two years ago brought 1,600 together; the Jerusalem meeting drew several hundred others who had not been in New York.

“I think there are thousands upon thousands of Jews who survived but do not really know it because their Christian foster parents never told them their origins--maybe just that they were orphans,” Foxman said. “For me, every Jew who survived but does not know that he or she is Jewish is another victim, a living victim, of Nazism.”

From the two conferences, women appear to outnumber men 8 to 1, presumably because hiding Jewish boys was more difficult because they were circumcised. Most who attended the meetings were hidden in Poland, France, Belgium, Holland or Austria. But many others are expected to emerge from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Some at the Jerusalem conference were literally trying to find out who they were. Orphaned in the war, their only identities were those given them on baptismal certificates from parish priests or forged papers. At the conference, they posted notes on bulletin boards and passed around pictures from convent schools.

“I know my name was Golda, but I was too young to remember our family name,” said Jacqueline Mulders, 56, of Brussels, using the name she was given while hiding with a Belgian family. “Maybe my sister Mala survived the war, too, and maybe I will find her here.”

There were cries of joy as people from the same ghetto, the same village and even the same family--two brothers who had not seen each other for 50 years--were reunited.

But there were also cries of pain as the wartime memories flooded back and the “hidden children” and their families struggled to resolve all the emotional conflicts that came with them.

“I was born Hanya Goldman,” Shore recalled. “But for decades, I denied this person’s existence. It was too painful to recall what I had lived through. I consequently had a double life--functioning as a wife, mother and artist by day and then having terrifying dreams at night full of running and chasing, fire and water, absolute calamity instead of sleep.”

With her mother and her sister, Shore, then 13, had found refugee with a Polish peasant woman after her father, a shoe merchant, was shot to death by Germans in the family home one night in 1942. They had hidden for months in a hayloft when the woman changed her mind and tried to force them to leave; Shore’s mother refused. Eventually, they moved to another hayloft on another farm, which they were able to leave when Soviet troops drove German forces back in 1945.

“By day, we knitted clothing for Jewish boys hiding in the forest, and after the moon went down, I went out to empty the bucket we used for a toilet and to forage for food in the fields,” Shore recalled. “The barn was so cold, we wrapped our fingers with cotton to prevent them from freezing. We couldn’t bathe, and the lice got ferocious. My mother was crippled from malnutrition. My little sister suffered (epileptic) seizures.

“We never knew from one day to the next whether we would survive, whether we would find food, whether we would have water, whether the Germans would come, whether I would come back from my trip out each night,” Shore said, tears flowing freely at the vivid memories. “Yet we survived, the three of us--three of God’s miracles.”

Most who came through such ordeals said they found it easy enough to celebrate their sheer survival and leave it at that. As they grew older, however, many have felt an increasing need to talk about their childhood and deal with the residual effects of isolation.

“To be in hiding was to be dislocated and dismissed,” Cal State Northridge Prof. Sarah Moskovitz, who has studied child survivors from the Holocaust, told the Jerusalem conference. “They felt like second-class citizens compared to those who survived the (death) camps. Today is the day to stop apologizing and recognize your place in history.”

Renee Roth-Hano, 62, a native of Mulhouse, France, hid for two years in a convent in Normandy with her sisters--and still “feels Catholic” in some ways. “I knew the prayers, I loved the Mass, I felt I belonged,” said Roth-Hano, who lives in New York.

Foxman told of his own confusion upon being taken back by his parents after the war. “I was raised a devout Catholic by my nanny, saying my prayers in Latin and going to Mass on Sunday,” he said. “After my parents got me back, my father would take me to (the synagogue) on Shabbos (Saturday) and to church on Sunday. Latin or Hebrew, it didn’t matter as long as I prayed to God.”

But there were problems after he rejoined his parents in Poland and then went to a camp for displaced people in Austria before coming to the United States. “Everyone called me what I took as a dirty name, ‘Jew,’ ” Foxman said, “but later I wanted to be accepted as a Jew.

“Each (of us) has had to work through these multiple identity crises--whose son or daughter are we, who were our brothers and sisters, which family was our real family?” he said. “Am I Christian or Jew--and am I that by faith and upbringing or by birth? Why was I ‘chosen’ to survive and others not?”

Yossi Peled, 52, a retired Israeli general, was born in Nazi-occupied Belgium during the war and grew up with a Christian foster family, praying in Flemish and going to church. When his mother, who managed to survive the Auschwitz death camp, came for him after the war, he did not want to go with her.

“ ‘How could she be my mother?’ I thought,” Peled said. “I didn’t want to leave what I thought was my family and go with this Jewish woman.”

When Peled was brought to Israel in 1949 to live with relatives, he told other children that his father died fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising because he felt ashamed that he had been killed at Auschwitz, not in the 1948 war for Israeli independence.

“Until I was 35 or 36, I couldn’t come to terms with who I was,” Peled said. “When the Belgian family that saved me came to Israel, I refused to see them--that is how difficult it was for me to accept my past, and I was 27 then.”

But Oleck Netzer, who was hidden in Poland as a child and now writes for the Israeli Labor Party newspaper Davar, found in his experience the overriding moral lesson that “human beings were capable of rising above the mass and choosing the other, humane alternative.”

“People like myself experienced hatred and prejudice twice, from two opposite sides, so it was impossible for us to don this clothing of identity comfortably, like everyone else, once to last a lifetime,” said Netzer, who lives in Tel Aviv. “We identified once with the good Poles and felt hatred for our previous Jewish identity. Later on, among Jews, we experienced hatred for our previous Christian identity in which we had been the recipients of the generosity, love and courage of those who saved us.

“What we emerged with was a fortified identity, one clear of national- and tribal-based prejudice and hatred,” Netzer said. “If there is anything we should pass on to the Jewish people in Israel today, it is the demand that we treat today’s persecuted minorities the way the ‘righteous Gentiles’ treated us when we were in their hands.”