As the threat of deportation grew, many Jewish parents in German-occupied territories considered hiding their children. Most families resolved to stay together, but others decided that the children would be safer in other hands. Children were passed to monasteries, convents, or non-Jewish neighbors who were willing to hide them despite strict laws against doing so. While this was traumatic for all members of the broken families, many children, who otherwise would have been killed, survived the war in this way. Some children lived openly with their new families, pretending to be the natural children of Christian parents. Others stayed in hiding and spent the war years in isolation. Many children who posed as Christians lost their Jewish identity in the course of the war.
Some children, such as Anne Frank, were able to hide with their own families in attics or cellars. Others spent dark months in makeshift hiding places behind false walls, or in bunkers in the ground. Unable to go outside, countless Jewish people depended on non-Jews who risked their own lives to bring them food, water, and news from the outer world.
In the ghettos, survival in hiding was much more difficult. Hiding places were easily detected by the Germans as they made house-to-house searches. For a child, the slightest mistake could mean deportation, as children were among the first to be deported from the ghettos.
Illegal organizations were formed to rescue Jews by hiding them. The Polish underground organization known as Zegota smuggled children out of ghettos and hid them in the homes of sympathetic non-Jews. In the Netherlands, the Dutch Underground hid and smuggled hundreds of children to safety. In France, several organizations established “safe houses,” where children whose parents were in concentration camps were hidden. One of the largest successes was in the French village of Le Chambon. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews survived the war after being hidden by the collective efforts of the town’s entire population.
