"I emerged from the death camps after enduring the most terrible experience ever recorded in history, damaged in body and spirit. After indescribable losses – my family, my childhood and my friends – I was overwhelmed with emotional and physical pain. The 'Kinderheim' [children's home] in Blankenese restored part of my lost childhood to me. It became my home. My teachers and the other girls I met became my friends and my family."
So recalled Renee Kochman (née Renia Baaf), who lived at a children's home established by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) in a formerly Jewish-owned estate on the banks of the River Elba in Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany.
The estate in Blankensee was one of many children's homes established to take care of tens of thousands of Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust, against all the odds. It is featured in "'My Lost Childhood': Children's Homes for Holocaust Survivors" – a new online exhibition uploaded recently to Yad Vashem's website.
The children's home in Zabrze, Poland, which housed children who had been removed from Christian homes and monasteries, is also included in the exhibition. Yishayahu Drucker, a chaplain in the Polish Army, was charged with "redeeming" the children and bringing them to Zabrze. Drucker encountered many obstacles, including sometimes removing the children by force against their wishes and those of the Poles who had sheltered them at great personal risk during the war. "In most cases, child survivors living with Poles didn't want to part from these Polish families," testified Drucker many years later.
"It was extremely rare for a child to agree to leave… Even when they had been badly treated, they didn't want to go."
Like many other Jewish refugee children, Drucker's charges were no strangers to extreme suffering. The smiling faces in photographs displayed in the exhibition inspire joy and hope, but mask profound depths of pain, trauma and grief. Some one-and-a-half million Jewish children and teenagers were murdered during the Holocaust. Like the adults, children experienced the Holocaust in all its brutality: in ghettos, in camps, in hiding, wandering from place to place, and on the death marches. They were the victims of abuse, humiliation, forced labor, starvation, neglect, and in some cases, even medical experimentation. Most of them had lost their loved ones and were robbed of their childhood. Now, once again, those who had survived against all the odds suffered the anguish of parting and separation. They were literally torn between their new Polish families and their biological parents, distant relatives or Jewish organizations, all of them claiming rights over the child.
The "Ilania" children's village was situated on the site of a former Jewish psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Children from across Romania were brought there – most of them orphans. The idea to bring the children there was the initiative of the Jewish Agency's "Youth Aliyah" project in partnership with the Joint and Dutch Jewish public organizations, and with the consent of the Dutch Government.
Zehava Hellman (née Goldie Kaufman) was thirteen years old when she came to Ilania. "After the hell of the camps in Ukraine and the institutions in Romania, the Netherlands was like paradise for me," Zehava remembers. "We were not regular children, but rather Holocaust refugees, plagued by fears and nightmares. At night, the children would cry and scream in their sleep… How comforting it was to know that a night nurse was sleeping at the end of the corridor. As soon as she heard cries or screams – she would materialize like an angel and comfort us, even without speaking our language…
"I blossomed there, and I think my sadness abated."
The majority of the caregivers, counsellors and teachers in these impromptu homes were young adults aged 17-25, sometimes only a year or two older than their protégés, and most had little or no experience caring for children – though many were former counsellors and members of Jewish youth movements. At their own initiative, they found and collected the children, established the homes, and gave their charges hope for a new life. What they lacked in experience they made up for in empathy. As survivors themselves, they could identify with the children's pain, comprehend what they had endured, and restore their faith in humanity.
Shmuel Rat, a Gordonia counsellor at Ilania, recalled the challenges of looking after the 6-16 year-olds: "It wasn't clear to me if we were really equipped to shoulder the educational responsibility for children who had been separated from their families and relatives, orphans who had personally experienced the horrors of the Holocaust.
"My fellow counsellors and I had experience in organization and guidance within the youth movement, but now a different kind of work was expected of us – to be entrusted with the children's day-to-day problems, and to be their only address, replacing their parents or relatives."
Through a range of artifacts, documents and video testimonies almost all from Yad Vashem's Collections, "My Lost Childhood" tells the story of seven children's homes established after the war for child Holocaust survivors in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Some operated for just a few months, others for several years. The children were placed there in an endeavor to rehabilitate them, return them to their people and religion, and to restore their childhood and youth after the horrors they had endured. The homes were established both at the initiative of individuals, and by youth movements and childcare organizations seeking to provide them with warmth, love and education until the time came to continue their journey – either to Eretz Israel or reunited with relatives in the United States, Latin America, Canada and other destinations.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 94.
