Hidden Children of the Holocaust

Book excerpt: In the summer of 1942 in Belgium, Jewish parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, they quite often found sanctuary in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages. Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation.