by alexandra j. wall
correspondent
It would be politically incorrect to suggest that, for the most part, Jewish children who were hidden during World War II should have stayed with the families who sheltered them.
But University of California Davis sociology professor Diane Wolf found that many Dutch hidden children believe they might have been much happier had they stayed with their adoptive families rather than face the difficulties that followed.
Her controversial assertion is just one of many in her recently published book, “Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland.”
As one interview subject told her: “Liberation was the beginning of my war. It was the beginning of a very troubled time.”
Wolf chose the title because she feels that “the Dutch government and state really rides high on the Anne Frank story, even though it really masks what actually happened in Holland during the war.”
While the Frank family story has become symbolic of the Dutch trying to save Jews, that is a false impression, Wolf said. “It was somebody Dutch who betrayed them, it was Dutch policemen who took them and it was Dutch men who ran the trains,” she said. “The person who ultimately helped them was Austrian. Even the fact that the Franks hid together was very unusual. That wasn’t the norm at all, since most Dutch families didn’t want into take in adults.”
A feminist sociologist who chairs the Jewish Studies program at Davis, Wolf is a San Francisco native who lives in Berkeley. Her parents were refugees from Germany. She first got interested in the topic of hidden children while doing research in Holland about Indonesia. Her interest piqued after a colleague told her about the OPK, a committee formed after the war by the Dutch state to help determine the fate of Jewish war orphans.
Wolf had never heard of such a thing. “I found it very surprising, since my image of Holland was that it was a country full of residents who hid its Jews.”
After the war, Wolf said, the Dutch state said it would not treat Jews differently than others. “But Jews needed more help. [Dutch] policies ended up being very anti-Semitic because they refused to recognize the need for more help for Jewish survivors. Holland was the only country that set up a state-level committee to make decisions over Jewish orphans.”
Being a feminist has influenced her research. For one thing, not much academic research on Holocaust survivors has focused on youth. “Children tend to be marginalized and silent in research,” she said. “These children were told by their parents after the war that kids have no memory, so in that way, children were ignored. Clearly, though, they do have memories, and their memories are pivotal for later life.”
While Wolf’s perceptions about the Dutch completely changed as a result of her research, so did her perceptions about Jewish families. She interviewed about 70 hidden children. Those who were orphaned, she found, had their fate determined by the OPK. But others weren’t much better off.
“It was very unsettling to look at what happened in Jewish families after the war,” Wolf said. “When one parent didn’t come back, and there were step-parents, there was a fair amount of child abuse, some of it sexual. But even in intact biological families where both parents returned, those were not happy places either. They were very disconnected and cold.”
“Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland” by Diane L. Wolf (391 pages, University of California Press, $21.95).
Diane Wolf will read from her book 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25 at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley and a discussion at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 11 at Tehiyah Day School Library,
2603 Tassajara Ave., El Cerrito.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California