“Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII”

By David DiCerto
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Would you risk your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to save a stranger's child? This is the moral dilemma explored in the eloquently emotive "Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII" (Cinema Guild).

Directed by Academy-Award winning documentarian Aviva Slesin, the film chronicles the heroism of non-Jews who at great personal peril sheltered Jewish children from the Nazis. Slesin, herself a former hidden child in Lithuania, weaves together haunting archival footage, personal photographs and interviews with both fellow survivors and the families who harbored them to create a portrait of luminous courage in the face of unfathomable darkness.

Before the Second World War, more than 1.5 million Jewish children were living in Europe. By the war's end, fewer than one out of 10 survived, the rest falling victim to hatred and indifference. Countless lives were lost because their neighbors stood by and did nothing. Many were paralyzed by fear -- aiding Jews carried a death sentence -- while others simply underestimated man's potential for cruelty. As one rescuer confesses at the opening of the film, "I never believed they would kill the children."

But some did act -- ordinary men and women displaying extraordinary bravery. Their heroism wore many faces, diverse in nationality and ideology -- Dutch, Polish, German, Belgian, Christian, communist -- but united in a humility that is the hallmark of true valor. Those interviewed eschew the term "hero," insisting rather that they acted out of a basic sense of human decency, declaring that it was the right thing to do -- a plain-spoken response noble in its unadorned simplicity.

Slesin abstains from hagiography, taking the complex relationships involved far too seriously to paint her subjects as cardboard saints. The filmmaker trusts the inherent drama of the stories to convey the necessary emotion, as illustrated early on by a Jewish woman who recalls -- chilling in its bare-boned urgency -- telling the family that was hiding her daughter: "You can punish her, you can christen her, you can do whatever you want -- only keep her alive."

And while critics accuse gentiles who took in Jewish children of acting less out of altruism than monetary gain or proselytizing, the film effectively documents the genuine compassion which prompted many to risk their own safety, and that of their families, in order to save human lives. As one rescuer candidly explains, "If they had caught us, first they would have shot my children right before my eyes, then the child we were hiding, and then they would have killed us. But we didn't think about the danger. We just wanted to save the child."

The disparate voices of those children interviewed -- now in their 60s -- create a chorus of emotions ranging from joy to resentment and alienation. For many of the children the price of survival was the loss of cultural identity: "I knew that I didn't belong there, that I wasn't a member of the family, but it was never explained to me who I was." One child, now a rabbi, recalls with almost cooing fondness helping his kindly protector prepare a Nativity for Christmas -- laying a piece of straw in the manger for every good act he did. Another remembers the euphoria of running around the town square after the war, proclaiming, "I'm a Jew."

Slesin does not shy away from showing the pain endured on both sides. At the close of the war, some Jews -- many recently liberated from death camps -- returned to claim their children. Rescuers routinely experienced the same heart-wrenching grief as had the biological parents when they first surrendered their children to their charge. A number of the children, handed over when they were infants and having formed bonds with their adopted families, found this second separation equally traumatic -- some even more so. In a reflective exchange, one woman, horrified to learn she was Jewish, explains to her elderly birth mother, with whom she now has a good relationship, how difficult it was not to recoil from her corpse-like appearance.

Those children whose parents did not return were barred from staying with their gentile families. Fearing assimilation, Jewish authorities took the children and placed them in Jewish homes. Some never saw their rescuers again, others not until many years later. Perhaps the most poignant moments afforded viewers are seeing several children -- now adults -- reunited with the people to whom they owed their lives.

It comes as no surprise that Slesin calls this her most personal film, "both the work of my dreams and my nightmares" -- part elegy for those lives lost and shattered, part love letter for those lives saved: "My mother gave me life and she (her rescue mother) gave me second life." Yet she admits, as a means of expressing her gratitude, it is at best inadequate: "You cannot repay for saving lives."

This is an important film. Unlike many projects dealing with the Holocaust, this is not a film about the banality of evil, but about the nobility of the human spirit. As one of the former hidden children observes, "They (the rescuers) show us, in the midst of evil, humanity at its very best."

"Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII" will air on the HBO pay cable channel later this year.

Due to some fleeting, violent archival images, as well as some emotionally disturbing content, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-II -- adults and adolescents. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America.

* DiCerto is on the staff of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film & Broadcasting.