Hostile and Malignant Prejudice by Levitt Cyril;

Author:Levitt, Cyril;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Case study 2. Remembering as a result of a claim for compensation

Ms G was born in Brussels in 1939. Her mother was Jewish, of Hun -garian origin, and her father a Jew from Lithuania. She was the eldest of their three children. Her younger sister was born in 1940, and her brother in 1942. During the war, the children were put into a child-care centre run by nuns. Ms G’s mother, who was worried about her own future and that of her children, asked the nuns to take care of them if she herself was deported. In 1942, their father was arrested in the course of a round-up, and about six months later their mother, probably denounced to the authorities, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Both parents died during the Holocaust.

Throughout the war years, Ms G and her sister were kept hidden in that child-care unit. Their names were changed, and they were both baptised in order to survive. Their brother could not stay with them because he had been circumcised—he was put into the care of a foster family. Given her age at the time, Ms G has no memory of her parents, her brother, or of the various separations that took place. Separated from her parents when she was three years old, she says,

We were so lucky during our childhood because we didn’t feel we were missing our parents—that’s what people think! But I must say that we didn’t really feel they were missing, because we were very well looked after.

Ms G does remember, all the same, that she was already more or less aware of the danger that surrounded her. During the war, the Gestapo came several times to inspect the children’s home, because they suspected that Jewish children were being hidden there. She escaped being rounded up by hiding in a cupboard.

At the end of the war, no one from their family turned up to take the girls home. As orphans, they stayed in that Catholic home, just as Mrs S had done. All through her childhood, Ms G was brought up as a Catholic, and she was very successful in her schoolwork. In 1953, the Jewish organisation10 set up to find Jewish orphans still being brought up in Catholic institutions discovered where they were. When she was given the opportunity, at thirteen years of age, of going to the USA to live with one of her uncles, she was delighted at the prospect—but things did not quite turn out that way.

The very next day, I left Brussels for Tournai11 because the nuns didn’t want us to be taken away . . . and that must have been terribly traumatic.

Once again, she had to hide and change her name. “At that time, we were given another name, because the nuns were well aware of the fact that they were searching mainly for orphans.” She was then abruptly separated from her sister and the nuns, after staying eleven years in that home. That second abrupt separation

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