Redemption and rupture: Hidden children of the Holocaust

Originally published: FEB 5, 2023, 11:15 PM, Times of Israel

Reclaiming the youngsters was an act of kindness to their murdered parents and to the Jewish people, but what about the children themselves?

Years ago, I met a woman who, after World War II and in the wake of the lost millions, worked to locate and retrieve surviving Jewish children. She herself had survived the Holocaust in a Siberian labor camp, cutting down primordial forests for lumber. When she made her way back to her native Poland, just 3% of Jewish children were still among the living. Many had adopted false identities and were harbored by Christian families or convents. The woman was in her early 20s then, and she joined an organized effort to find the children, remove them from their Christian placements, and return them to Judaism.

As a parent, as a philosopher, and also as a Jew, I was struck by the moral complexity inherent in the work of reconstituting a lost collective — the Jewish people — by reclaiming individual children, some of whom had likely forged bonds with their Christian caretakers after losing their parents and extended families. The children were not being returned to their original homes and families (for they had perished), but placed in a Jewish setting, such as a children’s home, a Jewish orphanage, or a kibbutz led by Zionist emissaries, in preparation for journeying to Palestine.