Katrina+4

  **Children of the Holocaust:** In Hiding


 * Story of Frank Siegel**

1942: Like Rachelle’s experience in hiding, Frank Siegel too was forced into hiding after his parent’s “failed attempt” to get into England. It was then mandatory for them to stay in Belgium where they were to follow under the harsh Nazi rule. Frank was soon sent to a home cared by a widow who was giving protection to orphaned children, while his mother was in a hospital when she was taken to Auschwitz, where she was gassed. Not long after, his father needed to put Frank in a more “permanent” place during the war. He decided to send him to a Catholic Orphanage at Namur, close to Brussels. At his new setting, Frank didn’t seem to enjoy the order and strict rules. He was with the rest of the children in a large dormitory. “Ten percent of whom were Jewish and the rest orphans of the war,” says Howard Greenfeld. Frank had unhappy memories of that place:

//I was always hungry, always hungry. I mean we ate just barely enough to live. W wanted white bread, not he grain bread they gave us. We wanted chocolate too. I had forgotten what the taste of chocolate was. I even forgot what citrus fruits were like, or bananas. I didn’t know what they were when the war ended and I started eating those things again. We ate basically breads, heavy soups, a little bit of meat, and a lot of rutabagas. My God, did we eat rutabagas! Beets. There came a time where we didn’t wear shoes anymore. We wore wooden clogs. They seem so cute, but believe me, wearing them is a pain, because they’re not tight. They bounce back and forth when you walk. We had lay teachers in the orphanage, not nuns. They just did the administration, the discipline and things like that. They used to kick us out in the middle of the winter with shorts, and we had to play outside. I remember those winters. The winter of ’43, mu God, it was murder because we had no coal. There was no coal, no nothing. During that time, I got these blotches. There were scars all over my legs. That was malnutrition.//

Unlike Rachelle, Frank liked the practice of Catholicism. He felt it gave him “a sense of belonging,” stated by Greenfeld:

//My gosh, I didn’t know what a Catholic was. I started going to Mass every day. I didn’t know. I had seen these huge churches, but you don’t analyze things when you are a little boy. I remember being on my knees, and the guy next to me says, “You see over there, there’s this box where they put the chalice, you know,” and he says, “Christ is in there.” And I couldn’t figure out how they got a whole body in this little box. I was a good student. I was No. 1 in catechism. They asked me if the pope was infallible. I said, Of course he isn’t infallible! I wrote a long essay, justifying my position. Of course, I flunked that one. Little by little, I began to understand the Catholic religion, and actually wanted to be converted. After all, it looked pretty good.//

Occasionally, Frank would go to visit his dad. He was able to socialize about life in the orphanage and get caught up with his father. In late 1943, he was moved to a home in Ciney. Says Howard Greenfeld from The hidden Children,“Life in his second home was far better than that at the orphanage, although without a mother and his father, it was not home.”