Never Again

‘Hidden Children: The Youngest Survivors of the Holocaust’ offers an upbeat message about benevolence and survival.

By: Ilene Dube
   When Monroe resident Ilse Loeb went to see The Pianist earlier this year, the Academy Award-winning film brought back painful memories of her past in Vienna. It was 1938, and Hitler’s troops were vandalizing Jewish businesses, making Jews kneel down to scrub the sidewalk with a toothbrush while onlookers laughed. Ms. Loeb was one of an estimated 100,000 hidden children who survived the holocaust.
   The former resident of Rockland County, N.Y., has worked with 16 other survivors of German-occupied countries during World War II to put together a traveling exhibit, Hidden Children: The Youngest Survivors of the Holocaust. The Gallery at Mercer County Community College will host the exhibit May 28-June 27.
   Ms. Loeb and her husband, J. Walter Loeb, live in a comfortable gated retirement community. Their home is furnished with clean, white modern furniture, the walls lined with cityscapes taken by their son, Michael, a photographer. Ms. Loeb graciously offers her guests strawberries and grapes and a seat in the sunroom off the kitchen. It is a nice life, but she will never forget what happened during Hitler’s reign of terror.
   "The importance of this exhibit is that these 17 people survived solely because of the goodness of a few people who stood out against the crowd — who had the guts to go against the regime," says Ms. Loeb. "What they did was very dangerous, but it’s why we’re still alive."
   These 17 survivors share their stories not to be pitied, but to honor their rescuers, to remember those who perished, and to educate people so such persecution will never happen again. The exhibit includes first-person narratives and photos, and the ultimate message is a positive one. "We survived, and we honor our Christian rescuers," Ms. Loeb says. "We were helped by people who did what others were afraid to do. One half of 1 percent did this."
   In 1938, when Ms. Loeb was 12, Hitler’s secret police came and confiscated her father’s print shop. "In five minutes, he lost his livelihood," she says. "All because he was a Jew. With nothing to do, he stood in front of his store with tears in his eyes."
   Then came Kristallnacht — the night of broken glass — when hundreds of synagogues were burned. "We smelled smoke from the synagogue in our neighborhood. They came to our apartment and told us to get out," Ms. Loeb recollects. "We had to leave everything behind and move in with another Jewish family. My father had to ask permission to go back to our own apartment to pick up clothes. They sent three men to watch everything we were taking. We weren’t allowed to take jewelry, but I did manage to take the gold watch chain from my mother’s dresser when they weren’t looking. I felt like a thief, taking what belonged to me." The gold watch chain is one of the few possessions she still has from her family. These were buried underground in a tin box during her three years of hiding.
   Ms. Loeb, her parents and a brother were sent to live with another family. "Then my parents sat me down and said they had to send me away. Under age 15, you could still leave on the kindertransport. My mother was afraid they’d send me to a concentration camp if I didn’t leave. We had a relative in the Netherlands. My poor mother. Imagine, letting your 13-year-old child go to a foreign city and never see them again? She missed me so much." Ms. Loeb’s mother wrote to her almost every day.
   On the train to Holland, Ms. Loeb traveled with a passport stamped with a "J" for Jew. One man in uniform tried to take it away from her, but knowing she’d get nowhere without it, the 13-year-old ran after him and demanded it back. "I knew I had to get out of Austria, and that gave me courage," she says.
   She carried a small suitcase containing a few clothes, a photo album, a diamond ring she still wears to this day, a pair of ice skates and the gold watch chain.
   In Holland she stayed with a Jewish family but was unable to go to school. Her foster family paid a private instructor to come to their home. The teacher’s son, a judge, tried to help bring Ilse’s parents to Holland, and even managed to arrange a job for her father at the Dutch mint. But when the Nazis found out Ilse’s father was a printer, they kept him to make counterfeit money.
   Then, in 1942, Hitler invaded the Netherlands and the problems started all over again. The letters from her parents stopped. Ms. Loeb later learned they were sent to an extermination camp.
   Ms. Loeb received a letter from the German authorities to go to the train station at midnight. Everyone advised her not to go, for surely the train would take her to an extermination camp as well.
   "’You have to disappear,’ they told me," says Ms. Loeb. "To become a hidden child, you need someone to take you in, give you food and shelter, and do it in spite of the danger. If found out, they, too, could be taken away, never to return."
   Ms. Loeb’s Dutch cousin, an engineer, was engaged to a gentile woman. That night, the fiancée met Ilse at the train station and covered up her jacket, emblazoned with the Jewish star, with another coat. She gave Ilse papers supplied by the Dutch underground movement.
   "It was a miracle I survived," says Ms. Loeb. "I became a Dutch girl, not Jewish. The Germans couldn’t detect that I spoke Dutch with a German accent."
   Ms. Loeb’s cousin had blond hair and blue eyes and could pretend to be a non-Jew. They rented a house together in a rural area and hid Ilse, while her cousin succeeded in working and living as a non-Jew.
   "He paid a high price for that," says Ms. Loeb. "He killed himself after the war." She takes a moment to glance down as her eyes fill with tears at the memory.
   Ms. Loeb remained in hiding from 1942 until 1945. During that time, she had no books, no music, and lived in fear. She couldn’t even leave the house, and every moment was spent worrying about being caught. She learned to suppress her coughs.
   Then American and English forces liberated France, Belgium and the southern Netherlands, but it only got worse for those in the northern part of Holland when the Germans put up a counter offensive. It was a cold winter, and there was no coal, gas or electricity. "It was the worst time for us; people were starving," she says. They had potatoes, but no way to cook them.
   She recalls a time when the Gestapo came to the house and she had 10 seconds to crawl into a hiding place that had been prepared for her. She remained there, shaking, knowing that if they didn’t find her this time, they would return a few hours later to search again. After that, Ms. Loeb was sent to stay with another family.
   When Ms. Loeb was finally free at age 19, she developed tuberculosis. She had no means of supporting herself, no education, and learned her parents had been killed. She had to spend 10 months in a sanatorium until her tuberculosis improved. Taken in by another family, she learned to sew and found odd jobs until she finally located her brother in Chicago. Once in Chicago, she received good medical care for the tuberculosis.
   A year later she met her future husband, who also had escaped from Nazi Germany. They had four children and lived for 31 years in Rockland County, where Ms. Loeb became acquainted with other Holocaust survivors and put together the Hidden Children exhibit. Dedicating her life to holocaust education, she gives talks to school groups and community centers several times a week.
   Mr. Loeb’s office in their Monroe home is well-equipped with a computer, a scanner, a printer. He prints out a picture of a red ice skate, one of the two Ms. Loeb escaped from Vienna with.
   "I am a witness and I am making you a witness," she says. "It’s now your turn to pass on the message that the holocaust happened."
Hidden Children: The Youngest Survivors of the Holocaust, an exhibit telling the stories of 17 people through narrative and photos, is on view at the Gallery at Mercer County Community College, Communications Building, second floor, 1200 Old Trenton Road, West Windsor, May 28-June 27. Opening reception June 1, 3-5 p.m.; Stories of Courage, produced by Barbara Streisand, will screen June 12, 7 p.m. Gallery hours: Wed.-Fri. 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Thurs. 6-8 p.m., Sat.-Sun. noon-4 p.m. For information, call (609) 586-4800, ext. 3589. On the Web: www.holocauststudies.org