About the workshop
During the persecution and extermination of Jews throughout Europe during the Second World War thousands of Jewish children were forced to hide in improvised surroundings. Many spent the duration of the Holocaust in secret attics and Catholic convents. Some lived openly with foreign Christian families. They had to struggle with a sense of being in constant danger and they spent their childhoods living under life-threatening conditions. During the post-war years, whilst adjusting to their new lives, these hidden children experienced a double trauma. Firstly, many were hidden when they were still infants, and therefore had no recollection of their parents. Others lost their families who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. The children who returned home to their parents, grandparents or siblings experienced significant psychological problems and had to adapt to their new way of life with their war-traumatised relatives. Secondly, during the war, these children not only had to live separately from their relatives, they also had to change their identity, and in some cases were compelled to forget their first language.
Thus in the post-war years these hidden children faced the double hurdle of adjusting to their psychologically damaged parents and to re-accustoming themselves with their pre-war Jewish identities. In many countries after the war the fates of these secret Holocaust survivors who grew up and lived their own lives have been forgotten, or at best their stories received very little attention. This workshop aims to revisit and reclaim the stories of these children in their respective countries and to examine the impact their hiding experiences had on them in their post-war lives.