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

The Holocaust units I created for my middle school students always included stories of survivors. From time to time we were fortunate enough to have a survivor visit the school for a personal talk. This was in the 90s, when more and more survivor stories were being collected, published, and made available to public school teachers. From these stories, a paradigmatic survivor emerged, one who had been liberated from one of the many camps, one who had somehow managed to defy death only to find that most if not all of her/his family members had been exterminated.

As Holocaust scholarship continues into the 21^st century, scholars are examining more closely other kinds of survivor stories—stories that challenge traditional notions of survival. In Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, sociologist Diane Wolf takes the reader on a disturbing journey into the world of hidden children. The book is based on over seventy interviews conducted between 1998 and 2001 with adults who were hidden as children in Holland. Wolf contends that only by examining both wartime and postwar contexts will we begin to understand the full effects of the Shoah. She uses a “sociological lens” to study these “other” survivors and their childhood memories, with the emphasis on what occurred in the days and years after the war as they dealt with their own war experiences as well as those of their parents and caregivers. While liberation meant one thing to those who survived the horrors of the camps, for hidden children liberation often ushered in yet another ordeal. As Wolf ’s title suggests, the now ubiquitous story of Anne Frank, however powerful and enlightening, does not represent the experiences of most child survivors from the Netherlands.

Beyond Anne Frank begins with a critical history of the ways in which survivor stories, and in particular the role of child survivor stories, contribute to our present understanding of the Holocaust. Wolf points out that most of the scholarly work examining the experiences of hidden children in the Netherlands focuses on Jewish orphans, bringing to light the activities of the Dutch Guardian Commission for War Foster Children (OPK) which made decisions about where and with whom Jewish orphans would be housed. Wolf offers a concise look into the relationship between the Dutch government and its Jews during the period 1940–45; unlike the popular image of the Dutch tolerance suggested by Anne Frank’s story, the most recent literature suggests that Dutch citizens were far more apathetic, even to the point of allowing the Nazis to deport and murder their own citizens. Only recently has the Dutch government, which for many years perpetuated the myth that the government acted in the best interests of its Jewish citizens, finally acknowledged its negligence.

The chapters that present the actual stories of hidden children form the heart and soul of Beyond Anne Frank. Although Wolf documents their experiences in hiding, she found that the most common refrain from hidden children was “my war began after the war.” The interviews are a powerful demonstration of how the Holocaust continued—and continues—to affect the lives and families of survivors. We meet Aaron and Maarten, who were so young when they went into hiding they did not even recognize their parents after the war. Older children, such as Ruth and Alfred, could be considered lucky to have both parents survive the war, but they often had to deal with their psychological baggage. Wolf’s sample tends to indicate that girls fared far worse than boys; they were more likely to feel rejected by their parents and had greater difficulty dealing with the damage to family relationships. One child, Jack, suggested that the parents who returned after the war were not the same ones he had known. Those children who had only one parent return often faced unique adversities. Usually, a widowed father would not be granted guardianship by the OPK and the...