This fascinating, informative, and original study relates the little-known story of the rescue of hundreds of Jewish children by Belgian nuns during the Holocaust. It is based in large part on interviews with sixteen women and twelve men who were hidden as children, eight nuns and one priest involved in the rescue operations, and two surviving members of the Resistance who escorted the children from their parents to the convents. The author underscores the intelligence, charity, and humanitarian impulses of the Belgian nuns and presents her findings within the larger context of Occupied Belgium.

Ninety-four percent of Belgium's 56,000–60,000 Jews in 1940 were foreigners who arrived after 1920. Like the Jews in other occupied countries, they were systematically deprived of their rights and property. Forty-five percent of them were deported; 5,093 of those deported were children under the age of 16. There was never a public outcry against these deportations. Nor was there a public stance by the Catholic Church (which was “the only institution to remain untouched by the German Occupation”) against the treatment of Jews. Whereas the Catholic hierarchy did almost nothing to help Jews, some of the lower clergy and nuns risked their lives to save them.

Vromen enumerates the traumas of the children: the humiliation of the star, separation from their parents, new identities, frequent dislodgments, convent life with its formal Catholic socialization, constant praying, strict discipline, corporal punishment, hunger, cold, scabies, and lice. One of the book's greatest assets is that stories are told, one after another, about individual youngsters, reacting differently in the same situations. We are presented with a human tableau rather than a thesis: different memories, emphases, likes, and dislikes. Children had to adapt to survive. Some convents refused to baptize children without parental consent. Others did not, but often so that children would be more easily assimilated. Baptism helped to complete “the cover-up.” Most of the children “reconverted” after the war. Jewish children had to be treated like all the other children. Only a few people knew whether a particular child was Jewish. The reader will never forget the story of Sister Clotilde who treated the Jewish girls just like the other students during the day but, as one of those students now reports some 65 years later, Sister Clotilde tucked her in at night, gave her a piece of candy and whispered in her ear in Yiddish, “Shloof git, mein kind” (“Sleep well, my child”).

The interviewed nuns explain how the rescue system worked and relate their memories which are as varied as those of the children. We learn of the absolute power of the Mother Superior in each convent. She alone decided in every case whether a child would be hidden. It was her entire responsibility to find the extra food and whatever else was needed to shelter each additional child. The main focus is on the Couvent de la Miséricorde in Héverlé, near Louvain, where Mother Cécile hid sixty-six children; and an orphanage south of Brussels, near Charleroi, where fifty children were sheltered. Many of the children talk about the nuns going from farm to farm with a wheelbarrow, begging food for them, even at times going to the Germans for potatoes. There were no denunciations in any of the religious institutions studied here. The single most important motivation of the nuns was humanitarian, the rescue of the child, not the saving of a Jewish soul.

The interviews with the two escorts, Paule Renard and Andrée Geulen-Herscovici, who led several hundred children to safe lodging, paint the anguish of Jewish mothers turning over their children to non-Jewish women who, for matters of safety, could not tell them where their children would be hidden. We also learn about the importance of the Belgian Resistance and of priests, such as Father Joseph André and Father Henri Reynders, who helped several hundred Jewish children find shelter. Vromen highlights the Committee for the Defense of Jews, founded by seven Jews and one non-Jew, to show that Jews and non-Jews worked together to get Jewish mothers to give them their children so that they could hide them from the Nazis. This was an interreligious, humanitarian endeavor with heavy female involvement, where the rescuers were carrying out “traditional feminine activities,” protecting, clothing, and feeding children.

One and a half million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis. Roughly 100,000 survived. They are collectively referred to as “Hidden Children.” When, after the war, they began to speak about their experiences, a hierarchy of victimization more or less silenced them. They were told they were the lucky ones. But, in the late 1980s, they organized collectively and still meet annually to remember their experiences and to look forward together. Hidden Children of the Holocaust gives us great insights into their lives in the convents and orphanages of Belgium. It also emphasizes the relatively underreported role that Jews played in the rescue of Jews throughout Europe, and proudly proclaims that the Jewish parents who turned over their children to be hidden should be considered rescuers, indeed the first rescuers. Finally, it has much to tell us about gendered commemoration, a situation that has downplayed the role of women involved in rescue. Initially, the priests were the ones recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Eighty-five percent of the forty-seven nuns who have been recognized waited until 1992 and after to be so designated by Yad Vashem. Probably as many as 200 convents in Belgium hid Jewish children during the Holocaust but the great majority of their Mother Superiors have never been appropriately commemorated. This superb book is essential to anyone interested in rescue, gender, and the Holocaust, and the history and psychology of Europe's “hidden children.”