Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (review)

As a sociologist, native Belgian, and Holocaust survivor, Suzanne Vromen is perhaps the perfect person to author a study of the Jewish children hidden by Belgian nuns during the Holocaust. Drawing on detailed interviews conducted with eight nuns, one priest, twenty-nine survivors who were hidden as children, and two lay individuals who escorted the children from their families to their hiding places, she both corroborates other findings about the child victims of the Holocaust and provides new understandings of their rescuers.

In the book's introduction, the author tells her own story of Holocaust survival. It therefore seems appropriate to mention it at the beginning of this review as well. Along with her immediate family, Vromen fled Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1941 for what was then known as the Belgian Congo, where she attended school in a convent. As she writes of her experiences, "I distinctly remember my initial bewilderment at being plunged suddenly into a Catholic milieu. I also recall how I eventually made my peace with the atmosphere of spirituality and the intense socialization that characterize convents" (p. 1). Vromen's background is relevant because it speaks to her abilities to contextualize her interview data. Indeed, she draws fruitfully on her experiences (which included a teaching stint at her school upon graduation) in her analysis, and is therefore able to approach the findings thoughtfully and objectively.

The book's title and subtitle are somewhat misleading, as together they imply that the book focuses mainly on the nuns. In fact, a detailed chapter on the nuns is presented along with equally rich chapters on the hidden children and on the lay rescuers. A fourth chapter devoted to collective memory and the commemoration of the rescue activities rounds out the analysis. Title aside, the book's structure is appropriate, as Vromen's analysis makes it clear that one cannot fully understand the hidden children's experiences without taking into account the experiences of the nuns and the other resisters, as well as the broader institutional context in which they operated.

The substantive chapters offer individual accounts that in many ways defy a simple summary. The convents in which the children were hidden differed in terms of number of children housed as well as resources available to care for them. The children's experiences varied further depending on their age, gender, and whether or not they were placed with a sibling. The children also experienced a range of reactions to their rescuers: while many responded positively to aspects of the Catholic religion and developed feelings of love and gratitude toward the nuns who sheltered them, others recalled nuns who either harmed them physically with corporal punishment or emotionally by humiliating them for unacceptable behaviors such as bed-wetting. Not surprisingly, baptism and participation in Mass feature prominently in the accounts. Interestingly, children hidden with siblings seemed more resistant to baptism. Vromen writes: "In the presence of a witness to one's past, it was easier to maintain one's convictions and feel protected by a sense of familial solidarity" (p. 24). But for many of the children, the Catholic religion gave them solace during a very difficult and confusing time. Even some of those children who were not baptized embraced aspects of Catholicism and incorporated it into their understanding of their circumstances. For instance, Vromen provides an account of a girl who, upon being reunited with her mother at the end of the war, demanded that her mother go to church to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for having survived Auschwitz (the mother went).

Without doubt, the hidden children suffered: they were abruptly removed from families that, in some cases, they were never to see again, then placed in strange new settings and expected to learn and participate in unfamiliar rituals. An account of their survival under these...