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283 Hidden Children/Child Survivors Chicago Mission Statement Definition The Hidden Children group consists of Jewish adults who were hidden during World War II’s Holocaust in order to survive it. Like other child survivors, we are the last living generation to have witnessed the Holocaust. History A generation of Jewish children disappeared during the Holocaust. Where they weren’t killed outright, they died of hunger, disease, or other Holocaust-induced causes. Yet a handful of children did survive. To survive, most of we children were hidden in some fashion, sometimes with their families but mostly alone. We lived with Christian families, or in convents, or on farms, or roaming the forests, or in the mountains, or in underground caves, attics, or other makeshift shelters. We are those children. Silent for a long time, possibly because our parents could not break their silence, some of us began to speak about forty-five years after the end of the war. The relief we found in speaking led us to other hidden children with experiences similar to ours. These connections grew worldwide, and in 1991, the first international gathering of sixteen hundred Hidden Children was held in New York, organized by the Hidden Child Committee, with the help of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Hidden Children/Child Survivors Chicago In 1992, a Hidden Children group was formed in Chicago, with the following initial objectives: 1. Hearing one another’s wartime childhood experiences and thereby learning to understand the strengths and coping capacities, as well as the difficulties we experienced as children and as adults, and 2. Educating ourselves about Jewishness, the Holocaust, antisemitism, and related topics. These topics have included the nature of our vulnerability and resilience, hiding as a form of resistance, our rescuers, our self-image as parents, and ourselves as children of our parents. Toward these ends, we met every other month. The meetings were generally attended by twenty-five to thirty people, though this number has declined of late. On some occasions we met with another child survivor group; and on other occasions , we invited our own children to meet with us and discuss how our experience 284 hidden children /child survivors chicago mission statement affects their lives. We’ve had several social events. Some of us also attended, and brought news from, international conferences about hidden children. In 1995, an informal self-survey suggested that our attendees were satisfied with these gatherings that focused on support, education, and social contact. Members of the speakers’ forum speak at public and private schools, churches and synagogues, civil service gatherings, and other community sites. The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center has now taken over this function. Mission Statement Since the inception of the group, our goals remain basically the same, with the added goal of more formally educating others. 1. To support one another while we learn from one another, regarding not only what happened to us but also what we’ve done with those happenings. 2. To educate ourselves as to the larger picture—of ourselves as Jews and human beings, of the war, of past and the present attitudes about us, of our relationship to our parents and children—a picture of who we were and are, in the context of the rest of the world; and to try to make sense of that picture. 3. To remember those who have perished and their circumstances, and to try to understand them and how our relationship with them in the past, and now, still affects us. 4. To educate others, first by faithfully telling or writing our stories and then by means of speaking, with the restraint and dignity we have attained over time, to a variety of audiences, including children. ...

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