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  • Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland
  • Ronald Eyerman
Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland. By Diane L. Wolf. University of California Press, 2007. 406 pages. $55 (cloth), $21.95 (paper)

Beyond Anne Frank is study of Jewish children taken in by non-Jewish families during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. Diane Wolf interviewed close to 70 of those "hidden children" more than six decades after the event. Her focus is on family dynamics and especially how the experience of living out the war in relative comfort and safety affected the long-term identities of these people. They were survivors of the Holocaust, but in a different sense than normally meant by that term. Part of this difference is captured in a phrase uttered by several of her informants: "My war began after 1945." While living with guilt may have been a common experience of many who survived the Holocaust (and the war generally), the survivors in Wolf's research lived with a different sort of ambivalence. They struggled not only with guilt but also with such basic existential issues as who am I and who is my family: those who most probably died under horrible circumstance during the war, or those who took me in and cared for me?

Besides recording the experiences of the hidden children of the Netherlands, this is also a story of the Dutch experience and behavior during the occupation. The title refers to the author's attempt to erode the myth of Dutch altruism and the related state ideology of resistance, both of which come together in memorials to Anne Frank. Building on recent scholarship which has called into question some of the established narratives of Dutch historiography regarding the fate of Jews during the war, Wolf provides a vivid account of the lives of Jews in the Netherlands before and after WWII.

Wolf's study reveals that for these children who survived by being taken in by foster families the real suffering started when the war ended and another kind of hiding began. There were few who wanted to hear their stories, which seemed mild in comparison with those of others. Especially in the Netherlands, where the focus was on the future and on rebuilding national unity, there was little room for recollecting a damaged past, especially with reference to the treatment of Jews and most especially to those Jewish children who survived through the good graces of others. Even more personally, those of the hidden children who had one or more [End Page 1355] surviving parent were at war's end confronted by "strangers" with whom they would be forced to establish a relationship. In Wolf's cohort, this was something which more often than not proved problematic. In fact, it was those who were orphaned who appear to have done most well. As for this group, Wolf recounts as one of her most surprising finding that "it was better for orphans to remain where they were if things were going well, meaning in a non-Jewish family environment…."(333)

Wolf's findings regarding the fate of these hidden children permit some more general remarks on the idea of the family and its role in the identity-formation and care of children. She suggests for example, that the hidden children in her study "fully experience what we now call 'post-modern families' shortly after 1945;"(336) that "biological ties do not necessarily a family make"(336) and that "children and their biological mothers tended not to reconnect after the war."(337) From this point of view, the book deserves a broader audience than those concerned with either the Holocaust or the history of the Netherlands. Beyond Anne Frank is well-argued and clearly written and should raise a few eyebrows. All of which is to say that this is a book very well worth reading by an audience broader than the usual professional networks.

Ronald Eyerman
Yale University
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