Cruel World (88 page)

The struggles over the groups of children scattered and moving around in the chaos of Germany were intense, but both there and in the less damaged West when the controversy involved individual children who had been placed in foster families, no matter what the reason, things became much more complicated. The problem was how to define the “best interests” of the child. Here too politics and religion would play a major part, but just as important at times were the bonds that had developed between the child and the foster family. Nowhere would this issue be more openly debated than in the Netherlands when it came time to decide the fate of the Jewish children who had been hidden there.

As soon as the southern part of Holland had been liberated, committees with both Jewish and gentile members were formed to take over responsibility for hidden children. These early groups were more concerned with food and education than religion, and in the unsettled conditions still prevailing they made no effort to move the children.
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By early 1945, funding was coming in to the committees from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Everyone gave high priority to the registration of the hidden children. The Dutch Resistance, concerned lest the children vanish in the chaos of combat, had distributed a pamphlet in September 1944, when the German surrender seemed imminent, asking foster parents not to relinquish their charges to anyone, even parents, without informing the Resistance. Later, Gesina van der Molen, a formidable leader of the Resistance
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who had been a member of a child rescue network, went further. She conveyed to the Dutch government in exile a proposal for the establishment of a nonsectarian Custody Commission for War Foster Children (OPK), which would take over all responsibility for children whose parents did not claim them within a month of the end of the war. If the parents appeared later, the OPK would decide if they were still fit to care for the children, and if not, or if the parents had died, who was. In its discussions on the creation of the OPK, the Resistance committee, which included a number of Jews, had leaned toward leaving children in foster homes if they were happy there. It is not clear how much, if anything, religion had to do with the proposal, but it is certain that the Resistance felt that “Dutchness” was important and that they wished to replace the “dual-fated community” of the Nazi years by a “general merging together.”
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It
is also clear that many of the prospective Jewish members of OPK no longer liked the idea of reestablishing a central Jewish Council, the institution that had been so well exploited by the Nazis. OPK was duly authorized and would begin operations immediately after the German surrender in May 1945. Their jurisdiction extended beyond the hidden children to include all kinds of war orphans.

There were other Jewish groups, however, that did not like the sound of OPK’s principles, and were suspicious of Miss van der Molen, who was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, not famous for its tolerance. Above all, she was known to regard Dutch children as just that and not particularly as Jews or Christians, and to be associated with Jews who favored assimilation. Those Jews who favored a more independent stance now set up their own commission, and Abraham de Jong, who was Orthodox and Zionist, founded yet another. The fragmented situation was not improved by a letter sent to the patriotic Miss van der Molen by Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine in which he thanked the Dutch people for having rescued Jewish children, but declared that

Despite the admonitions of the Resistance, hundreds of foster parents had, without informing the OPK, and often with great emotion, immediately handed over the children they had hidden when their parents reappeared. Four thousand more children were registered with the organization, and about half of these were also quickly returned to their families. In the next four years, more than 1,300 custody cases relating to the remainder would be considered by the OPK. The Dutch Jews, who were in the minority on the commission, were not all as enthusiastic as Rabbi Herzog about sending the children to Palestine, but did feel that the probable wishes of the deceased parents regarding the upbringing of the children should be considered. This was not a problem when the parents were known to have been observant. The children were then placed in Jewish families or, since there were not enough of these, in Jewish orphanages. Decisions were more difficult for the offspring of assimilated families.
Some Jewish members of the committee were outraged when gentiles attempted to decide if a child was really Jewish. They felt that non-Jews did not understand “the social and cultural aspects of Jewish identity,” and they insisted that all the children were still Jewish (an attitude considered “racist” by the gentiles). Furthermore, the Jewish members felt that OPK’s policies violated the Dutch tradition of self-determination within any given religion.
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Others joined the controversy: a psychologist wrote articles stating that the children would be traumatized by being removed from their foster homes, and Rabbi Herzog, not giving up, wrote the Dutch Prime Minister requesting that the children “be restored forthwith to their rightful guardian—the Jewish Community.”
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He also invited Miss van der Molen and a companion to visit Palestine. The two ladies were very favorably impressed with all the schools and child care facilities they saw, agreeing that Palestine was a good place for children to go. Gesina Van der Molen, educated as a lawyer, did not, however, approve of the idea of a purely Jewish state, and wrote to the Dutch Foreign Minister that she was afraid that Jews who had converted to Christianity were “oppressed” there.
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Meanwhile, the pro-Zionist Jewish committees in Holland had enlisted the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade (a unit that had served with the British and sported spiffy uniforms with a Star of David emblem) to visit the children in Holland and to send them letters describing how happy the boys and girls in Palestine were and inviting the Dutch children to come and help “build up our beloved motherland.”
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Relations on the OPK deteriorated steadily; the Jewish members were, for example, not informed of court hearings on the placement of the children, some of whom were given to gentile families without counterarguments. In July 1946, most of them resigned. This contretemps was patched up, and the work went on with better cooperation. An estimated 75 percent of the boys and girls ended up in Jewish households or orphanages.

It is hard to say exactly how much these controversies affected the children’s placement. The piles of case histories that survive show many different situations and sensible efforts to resolve them humanely. Some do contain accusations by relatives that foster parents had attempted to convert children permanently to Christianity, against their desires. There are numerous recommendations to remove children from these and other foster families for all sorts of reasons. In some cases, Jewish relatives abroad requested that a child be sent to them, which was done. Some older children asked to go to the Jewish children’s homes and found tremendous solace in their atmosphere, but would still visit their foster parents for
weekends or outings. Others ended up in the homes when life with the Jewish families in which they had been placed was unhappy. One boy could not bear the sadness of living with a couple who had lost all their own children in the camps, and another was thrown out by his aunt and uncle when he wanted to visit his Protestant wartime protectors, who had allegedly had “Christian influence” on him.
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The cases are often complex. In June 1946, the aunt and uncle of Sally and Lieslotte D., aged nine and six, went to court to get custody of the girls. Their parents had perished at the hands of the Nazis, and they had been living with Christian foster parents, who, everyone agreed, were wonderful. Indeed, two other uncles and two second cousins “declared themselves emphatically in favor of the continuation of the residence of the said infants” with the foster family. The judge, clearly agonizing over the religious aspect, noted that both the parents and grandparents of the children had been Communists, and that probably “education … in any outspoken Jewish religious sense was not intended,” adding with some feeling, “For my part, I have only to look into and after the interest of the infants and I cannot consider it my task to make a stand for the Jewish community of blood and/or race as such.” Since the foster mother had promised not to baptize the children and to leave them free to “determine their religious conception of life for themselves,” the judge ordered that they stay with her.
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The situation of nine-year-old Max G. was sadder. His foster mother admitted that Max had been homesick for a month when he arrived and that she had spanked him with the rug-beater when he misbehaved. She also said that she wasn’t really very fond of Jews and admitted that she liked her own children better. The OPK interviewer noted that the house was unwelcoming and messy. But the family situation of Max’s uncle Lion W., who was petitioning for custody, was not ideal either. Lion, who had spent time in the camps in Poland along with his father, had a new wife who seemed fond of Max, but was very busy with her new baby. The grandfather, Simon W., “a somewhat brutal, aggressive figure,” lived in the same house along with his mistress-cousin, who was an Auschwitz survivor and “somewhat unbalanced.” In this situation, the OPK worker felt that the best place for “attractive,” “bright” Max would be the Jewish orphanage.
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Despite all the fussing, there were only a few open rebellions against the OPK decisions, the most famous being the widely publicized and much appealed case of nine-year-old Anneke Beekman, the child of Orthodox Jews, who had been left in the care of five Catholic spinsters.
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The girl disappeared when it was decided that she was to go to a Jewish
family. The sisters, despite several stints in jail, refused to give her up. The Dutch authorities tried for years to find Anneke, but she did not surface until after her twenty-first birthday in 1961, having lived under a false name in France with one of the ladies. Her reappearance was a national sensation. She was interviewed on television, and at a press conference she was peppered with tough questions about the Holocaust and asked why she did not feel Jewish. Anneke seemed unable to answer most of the inquiries and denied that she had been abducted. After this unsettling experience, she went back to the five sisters’ house, where she lived quietly until 1965, when she married a Frenchman and left Holland.
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The question of the “best interests” of the child arose in a different form in Germany. Although the child welfare workers had encountered numerous groups of “Germanized” children, they did not for many months fully understand the Nazi programs behind the children’s transformation. They had quickly become aware of the fact that unaccompanied children of “United Nations” nationalities were to be found not only in the DP camps, but also in the German community. The workers also knew about the Nazi policy of separating Eastern workers from their offspring and had wrongly assumed that most of the children living in German households and institutions were in that category. In the late summer of 1945, therefore, a directive was sent to Civil Affairs units requesting that they require German burgomasters to list all foreign children in their towns. In the frenetic activity of the early days of occupation, this census was not promulgated or followed up with efficiency, and results were meager. And, although lost children were registered in a centralized tracing bureau set up for all refugees, there was as yet no special clearing file for children.

By the late fall, UNRRA workers sent out to find and register adult DPs living on their own on the German economy had found more than 1,000 children they were sure were foreign in German institutions in the eastern part of the U.S. Zone. In the British Zone a Polish group reported that a group of children who might be Polish were living on one of the Frisian islands in the North Sea near Bremerhaven. The children had apparently been seen by “people in UNRRA uniforms” in the summer of 1945, but no record of this visit had reached headquarters. It was not until December 1946 that the thirty-one children, aged eight to fourteen, and the two nuns caring for them were found. They had been evacuated to the island by the
Nazis from an institution where they were forbidden to speak Polish, which by now they had mostly forgotten. Since the local authorities thought they were German, they had not received the extra food given to DPs, and were seriously malnourished.
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UNRRA was convinced that there were many more cases like this one, and that the children, if not discovered, would soon disappear forever into the German population. But, required to deal with the care and repatriation of the children already in the camps and later with the infiltrees, they did not have sufficient resources to begin a thorough search. They knew little enough about most of the children they did bring in, as the Germans had done a good job of destroying records and, as one UNRAA worker noted, “amnesia seemed to be a prevalent malady in Germany.” Thus the Lebensborn children who had been brought together by the Nazis at Steinhöring were found and taken to the UNRRA children’s center at Kloster-Indersdorf with no indication of who they were.
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As the camps and homes for unaccompanied children started to stabilize and the boys and girls became less fearful, the welfare workers began to hear disturbing stories about their “schools” and experiences. During these conversations, it became clear that there were other children not only in institutions, but also on farms and in families all over Germany, and indeed, numerous Yugoslav boys had been found working on farms in Bavaria in October 1945.
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Soon the names and true character of Nazi organizations began to surface. The NSV was prominent among them. One boy told an UNRRA team, “If your father was German and your mother was Polish the NSV took you away from them and made you speak only German.” Another, from Serbia, described being taken away to a home in Katowice, in Poland, where there were about 200 children, all of whom spoke Polish. The whole group was constantly urged to speak only German, and “when I spoke Serbian they boxed my ears.” This story was confirmed by a Polish nun who had accompanied some of the children when they were moved to Germany from Silesia. A thirteen-year-old Polish girl described medical experiments performed on her and her friends at a special hospital for “backward” children, at Loeben (Lubliniece), and said that the children who could not endure the treatment were sent “to a special house” where they all died and were buried in mass graves in the woods. Another nun, “though apparently reluctant to acknowledge German misdoings,” verified these facts and admitted that her order was required to “Germanize all foreign children” in its children’s home; the order had also been instructed that “all the children whose parents
were not Germans have to be sent to Loeben,” where they were given “injections and pills, after which the children became mad or they were gone.”
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