Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Abstract

Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish ‘hidden children’ and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise.