I. Experiencing the Holocaust Reverberations of a Hidden Childhood (article)

I was born into the Holocaust. Since the start of the Second World War, the Russians had occupied the area of Poland where my parents had had their roots for many generations. Under Soviet occupation, a two story family house in Lwow was requisitioned and turned into a maternity ward. There on a cold night in January of 1941 Mother gave birth to me, her first child and first daughter.

Page 179

Her second child, my little sister Jasia, was born in hiding three years later in a small village near Lwow, where Mother and I had taken shelter from the Nazi death machine that had overtaken the area in June of 1941. By the time that Jasia was born, my father had escaped from the concentration camp where he had been an inmate at the start of the German occupation, and had been hiding in our attic for at least nine months. Mother had hidden him in this tiny garret which was attached to the apartment we rented from an unsuspecting couple who had no idea that they were harboring Jews.

We survived in hiding until we were liberated by the Russians in the summer of 1944. It was a rare occurrence in those dark days, an entire family unit surviving together a woman with a false identity, her two children, and a husband hidden out of sight.

After liberation another trauma awaited us. While my parents mourned the loss of thirty-five relatives, my baby sister, little Jasia, who had not even learned to walk yet, died of whooping cough at the age of thirteen months. Shortly after this tragedy, we left what now had become Ukrainian territory and found our way to western Poland and then on to Paris, France where we lived for another five years on a temporary visa waiting for the day when we could immigrate to the United States. In the fall of 1951, the day finally arrived.

As life began anew, we embarked on the long recovery process. Years of hiding and displacement were somehow relegated to a place of unreality, like a nightmare that disappears in the light of day, except for brief moments when it intrudes into the waking state before it fades back once again into its dark terrifying place. My parents seemed particularly eager to believe that I had not been affected by the events that had transpired. They reasoned that since 1 was so young during the time of the Nazi occupation and could not understand what was going on around me, I would be unaffected and spared the bad memories a naiveté that was no doubt fueled by their desire to protect me.

I obliged by a process that I now understand as dissociation. My memories of the years in hiding, though few and without a context to give them meaning, persisted as fragmented images like old snapshots but they were not integrated into my life. I acted as if my real life began when we arrived in Paris when I was five years old. When in later years I did talk of my early childhood, I felt disconnected from those events and reported them in a robot-like way as if I were describing facts that had no bearing on my life.

Like so many other hidden children, I remained in hiding into adulthood. Unbeknownst to me, my personality and character had been shaped by the war and its aftermath. I developed into a cautious, quiet child who got along with everybody and did not make waves. I had a strong need to understand what was going on around me and quickly learned and adapted to new surroundings. Despite my reticence to stand out, academic achievements in school settings brought me recognition and a sense of being special.

Page 180

One of the most upsetting experiences of childhood was my discovery of being Jewish. Before the war my parents had not felt any strong affiliations to their religion. My father had dissociated himself from his Orthodox roots, and my mother’s family was well assimilated into Polish culture. There were numerous intermarriages in her family, and if they considered themselves Jews it was only in a secular sense. With the advent of the Second World War my parents’ Jewish identity was thrust upon them like the Star of David that they were forced to wear. Mother’s intimate knowledge of Polish culture and her flawless Polish made it relatively easy for her to assume a Catholic identity in order to survive. When we went into hiding in a small village near Lwow, she arranged to have me baptized. It was very fortunate for us that I did not look Jewish. With my fair skin, blond hair and blue/green eyes I could easily pass for a Polish child and provide her with the cover she needed to maintain her image.

When I was about eight years old and living in France, a Catholic country, my little friends began to prepare for their First Communion. They got to dress up in beautiful long white dresses, have a party, and feel very special. I was looking forward to my First Communion until my parents said it was out of the question since we were Jews and we did not celebrate this event. I was deeply disappointed. I didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish; all I wanted was to be like everyone else around me. I determined to convert as soon as I was old enough to do so.

In New York, surrounded by many more Jews, the resolution to convert gradually faded, but the sense of my Jewish identity remained shaky. Not surprisingly, the fact that, early in life, Judaism was associated with danger and Catholicism with safety continues, on deeper levels, to have an impact on many of us who survived in hiding with a Christian identity. An interesting example of the re-enactment of a childhood experience occurred in my late twenties. I became romantically involved with a man of German descent who had been a Roman Catholic priest for many years and was training to become a psychoanalyst. Although his intention was to leave the priesthood eventually, when we first began to live together he continued to function as a part-time parish priest. For over a year, without awareness of the re-enactment, I participated in a strange charade. On Sunday mornings we attended Church together—he the priest, I the parishioner a Godless Jew in hiding, sitting in the back of his church. Both of us hiding our true identities, but this time life and death were not at stake.

From the vantage point of middle age, I can see how other life choices have been influenced by my early experience of unacknowledged trauma. I believe that I became a psychologist and a psychoanalyst as a way to further my own healing process. My need to understand myself, to express my feelings, and to integrate dissociated aspects of my experience rendered me sensitive to these same needs in others. By helping my patients with these issues, I could help myself as well. It is not surprising that so many survivors and their children have found their way to helping professions.

One aspect of the training to become a psychoanalyst is a personal analysis. When it goes well, it can be an immensely gratifying, enlightening experience. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. In the 1960s when I was in my twenties, few psychotherapists were sensitive to issues brought in by survivors and many imposed their theories of development onto us.

Page 181

My first analyst was less interested in exploring the impact of my early traumatic experiences and more interested in how the oedipal complex unfolded in my life. Furthermore, his stance of detachment and non-responsiveness did not foster the safety that could have encouraged me to develop aspects of myself that had been inhibited and constricted by the necessities of survival in the hostile and dangerous world of my early childhood.

This was fortunately followed by another analysis with someone who was more self-revealing and less self-protective and encouraged open communication between us. I had chosen him carefully for his attributes as a person as well as his expertise as an analyst. Before I entrusted my psyche to him, I had experienced him as my teacher and as my supervisor for several years. I knew that I could trust him and feel safe enough to express myself freely and feel understood. Initially we worked together for about a year, mostly on the here and now of my life then, and when I was finally ready to address my childhood trauma seventeen years later, I returned to work with him.

By the time I resumed analysis, there was a greater awareness of the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of survivors and their children. The change in the Zeitgeist was evident in the proliferation of Holocaust-related memorials in various forms: museums, archives, films, memoirs, books and journal articles appeared on the subject regularly. A major social shift was taking place and gaining momentum. As survivors began to die out and society lost its living witnesses, there developed a sense of urgency to record our stories for posterity. A growing anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial added significance to the project.

In this climate it was easier for those of us who had not spoken much about our Holocaust past to find a voice. What had once been a source of shame for many of us, having been victims of crimes no one wanted to revisit, now became a source of pride. We had the power to speak for those who could not speak for themselves, and we could exercise courage in facing our own demons in the process. Many of us bore witness through videotaped interviews and some of us additionally wrote our stories. In 2002, my memoir, A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust was published. The event was a life changing experience; for me it represented coming out of hiding and coming to terms with my personal history. It was an important step on the long and winding road to healing.

Page 182