Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (review)

It is thought that only 25,000 or so of the 140,000 Jews threatened with deportation in the occupied Netherlands attempted to go underground, of whom perhaps 15-16,000 survived, including some 4,000 children. The history and sociology of these "hidden children" have been extensively discussed in the Dutch literature since 1945, but with the notable exception of the articles written by Joel Fishman and Bert-Jan Flim, little has appeared in English. The appearance of new interview material and analysis in Diane Wolf's new book therefore is a welcome addition to the canon.

The author has clearly structured and signposted the volume, beginning with a survey of the literature on hidden children in the Netherlands, as well as on the psychiatric and psychoanalytical theories underpinning her study. Wolf then details the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, and their return to or re-emergence in postwar Dutch society. She follows this with an investigation of the experience of hiding and its various forms before arriving at the core of her study: the children's post-liberation experiences leaving their foster guardians for surviving families or the care of postwar Jewish organizations. Several chapters sort these experiences by family circumstances: the author distinguishes cases in which both parents survived, one survived, or none survived. In the last case, various resolutions were possible, but the future of these children was frequently contested between the residual Jewish community and the organizations that had sheltered the children. The debates between the community and state agencies charged with the welfare of orphans were often highly acrimonious. Children might remain with foster parents, and thus be lost to the community, or be sent to distant relatives, to unrelated Jewish families, or a Jewish orphanage. Examples of all variants appear in Wolf's book and the reader is left with a much clearer picture of the history and memory of her subjects.

Wolf's sampling procedure is made very clear in the opening pages. She drew upon interviews in the United States, Israel, and the Netherlands, suggesting that every effort had been made to find child survivors with the broadest range of postwar experiences. The author acknowledges using the English language with most of her interviewees and having a rather unsuccessful experience when using a Dutch interpreter. Relying on intermediaries does lead to problems in asking precise questions and precisely interpreting the answers, yet even when English is used, it may have been a second or third language for many of the subjects. The reviewer's own experience with interviewing survivors suggests that memories are sometimes language-connected.

Many of the later chapters contain extensive summaries of interviews, constituting important testimonies in their own right. They bring to light for the first time in English some of the significant traumas suffered by these children. By comparison, the analytical points are relatively brief and do not provide many definitive conclusions. In part this reflects the size of a sample perforce limited, the smallness of the number of postwar experiences in each category making comparison difficult. The author also looks at the longer-term impact of hiding and postwar trauma on the children, drawing three main conclusions: all were seriously affected by their experiences; the survival of one or both parents did not guarantee a happy emotional life (a comparison with the experience of Christian children who had been evacuated and then returned to their families after the war might have been instructive); but creating an identity and collective memory long afterward acted as a form of social medicine ( p. 294).

The overall conclusions of the book extend further. They suggest that the experiences of hidden children differed from those of child survivors who returned from captivity. They also suggest that most of the formerly hidden children were dissuaded by their families from voicing their memories in the postwar period—the ones who did so...