When I was asked to write about my experiences as a hidden child during World War II, the question was posed: Why do I return every year to visit my benefactors? I was literally taken by surprise. The reasons had never occurred to me.
When I was three-and-a-half years old, I was sheltered in a convent in Banneux Notre Dame. Word came that the Germans were looking for Jewish children so the Mother Superior asked her three sisters, who lived in the small village of Fraiture hidden in a valley of the Ardennes Mountains in Belgium, to take me in.
Thus I spent the war years with Tante Marthe, Tante Marie and Maman, the woman I called Mom. My adopted Maman, gentle, soft-spoken and chubby, taught me songs, let me help her knead bread and bask in the smell of the lavender she placed in the linen drawers.
Tante Marie taught me in the little school house with six different levels of students. Tante Marthe knew secret corners in the attic, hidden magic in the fairy tales she read to me. The war finally ended. My father found me through the convent where I had originally been sent. My mother and my sisters and brother had all disappeared. I lived with my father, an ill, frightened, wounded man, in Belgium. He let me return to my rescuers in Fraiture whenever I had a vacation. It was recapturing the warmth, the fullness of those other times.
In 1951, we came to America. We traveled on the S.S. America, an incredible adventure for a 12-year-old. But I thought I would never see Tante Marthe, Tante Marie and Maman again.
My father died when I was 21 and I decided to go back and visit my "aunts." It was the first of many visits. Tante Marie died in 1989 and Tante Marthe and Maman are now in a home for the aged, a delightful place surrounded by flowers, beauty and caring people.
I know why I go back. . . for me it will always be HOME, the place where my heart belongs.
The Hidden Child Front Page | Holocaust Front Page
ADL On-line Home | Search | About ADL | Contact ADL
© 1999 Anti-Defamation League
