12
child to avoid raising suspicions among their neighbors. Many hid-
den children therefore suffered the heartache of being torn not only
from their parents but from their brothers and sisters as well.
Hiding in someone else’s family meant learning unfamiliar cus-
toms, obeying new rules, and sometimes feeling like a burden or a
danger. Many hidden children also had to move multiple times as
circumstances changed. Caretakers might have agreed to keep them
only for a certain period of time and turned them out if their parents
did not return for them. Some caretakers looked after Jewish children
only as long as someone was paying them to do so, and when money
ran out, so did their hospitality.This was not necessarily because host
families were greedy or cruel. During the years of WorldWar II, food
was scarce in Europe and many people were very poor. Some families
sent hidden children away because they simply could not afford to
feed them anymore.
Nevertheless, moving from one home to another made hidden
children feel displaced and unwanted. “The tensions were horrible,”
says Otto Verdoner, who was hidden by a Christian family during
the Holocaust. “Things were just weird, weird, weird. . . . It is like you
slam a door, everything disappears, you are somebody else. And you
have no history, no antecedents, no memories, everything is wiped
out.”
4
Double Identities
In addition to the emotional trauma of being separated from loved
ones and familiar things, children who were old enough to know they
were Jewish faced the difficult task of pretending they were not. Most
hidden children were expected to pass as Christians, usually Catho-
lics. They had to go to churches and learn customs contrary to their
own faith. Most young people from Jewish families were used to at-
tending synagogues, not churches, observing the Sabbath—or day of
rest—from Friday to Saturday evening, and reading Judaism’s most
important text, the Torah, often in the Yiddish language. Pretend-
ing to be Catholic meant attending mass and observing the Sabbath
on Sundays, studying and reciting prayers in Latin, and following
the teachings of the Bible, including worshipping Jesus and the Vir-
gin Mary. Christians observed different holidays than Jews, such as
