Katrina+3

**Children of the Holocaust: ** In Hiding 

Spring of 1942: Two years of age, Rachelle is sent into hiding after hearing about the "increased pace of the deportations of Jews from Belgium to concentration camps." With her brother, Rachelle is taken on the rural areas of Brussels to a protestant orphanage, which is hard to find in a Catholic country. In the orphanage, Rachelle slept in an attic and hated the food- "basically a liquid broth, a yellow liquid, with one solitary little carrot swimming in there." Even though her brother and her two cousins accompanied Rachelle, she felt like she was all by herself when she was sick on her third birthday: //I had something; I don't know what, mumps or whatever. My aunt came to visit her own children, and she brought chocolate pudding from my mother, and that was an enormous treat. I remember that. I was in isolation at the time- they put me in a separate room because I was sick- so I didn’t even see my aunt. Someone just came in and handed me the chocolate pudding, and said, this is from your mother. And I remember sitting there, eating my chocolate pudding with tears running down my face.//
 * Story of Rachelle Goldstein **

Soon enough, Rachelle was sent to another hiding place because of a threat of a runaway who claimed to report to the police about the Jewish children hiding at the orphanage if anyone attempted to catch her. Because she was not safe to go back home, Rachelle’s mother made arrangements to send her to a “Franciscan convent-, which also ran a nursery school- near Bruges, in northern Belgium,” states Howard Greenfeld, the author of The Hidden Children. At this new setting, Rachelle is alone without her brother or two cousins to comfort her for one and a half years, because they are sent to a convent for older children. At the convent, Rachelle has a hard time with the Christian religion she is “forced” to practice: //We started off praying in the morning. I remember the room where we had to wash. It had a lot of little sinks, and it was very, very clinical-looking. White tile, cold water- there was no hot water. I remember dressing and then going to church. I remember not enjoying church very much. I didn’t like having to sit with my knees on the kneeling stools. They were made of rush, which would dig into my knees. And I remember I would complain because we had bare knees, and then I’d get yelled at. I got a good indoctrination. They used to say that Jesus died on the cross because of your sins, and here you are complaining because of this. The thing that got to me was that was the first time I heard of the word sin. That was the main feature of the speech of the day. The word sin appeared in every other sentence, and I didn’t even know what sin meant. I remember asking, what’s a sin? So everything seemed to be a sin as I remember. I didn’t know what they were talking about….// //After church, they would take us down into the garden and there was a path with crosses- there’s a name for that, the Stations of the Cross or something- and we had to go and kneel again. So from kneeling in church to kneeling out there, summer or winter, it made no difference, and in the cold with bare knees. And, of course, in the garden they had little pebbles and stuff for you to kneel on. I just remember it being unpleasant.//

For Rachelle, and many other children, it was hard for her to understand what it was like before the war and what it meant that people were saying: //People would always be talking to me about “before the war.” The phrase before the war was constant. Everybody always said it, and I remember going to people saying, What is it? What was it like before the war? And people would go into it. Their eyes would suddenly light up, and they would say, Oh, before the war, it was paradise. And I would say, What do you mean, What was it? They would say, Oh, we had… And then they would go into rhapsodies of all the things they had. I didn’t know what they were talking about. I had absolutely no idea of what they were talking about. They would talk about after the war, and say, We will have all these things again. I couldn’t wait to live through whatever it was we were going through and have all the things these people were talking about, I just didn’t know what they were.//

Many of the children in the holocaust who were separated from their parents and relatives, became very worried that they might not survive the war. They also were concerned that their parents would never be able to find them if they ever came looking. Rachelle was one of these children: //<span style="font-size: 130%; font-family: Georgia,serif; color: rgb(121, 37, 37);">I was absolutely devastated over this. I kept on saying, They’ll never find me. How will they find me? And they (the priests and nuns) kept assuring me, They’ll come after the war, they’ll find you. And I kept saying, They can’t! How will they find me? They didn’t bring me here. How do I know where I am? And they would assure me, they’ll find you, they’ll find you. I remember worrying about it all the time at night. How would they find me? Also, I knew they were in a place called Brussels. And when there were bombings, there would be so many planes that everything shook when they went over us. All the windows were always taped to prevent them from shaking, so they would not shatter when there was a bombing. People would say, Don’t worry, they are going to bomb Brussels, they are not coming here. And then I would really worry. That really disturbed me.

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