Jews in Hiding

Hiding place in which Anne Frank and her family hid for 2 years before being found by the Nazis.

Today, I learned a lot from visiting the Netherlands Exhibit at Auschwitz 1 about how Jews hid and what they did in order to not get captured and brought to the camps. As you can see in photo 1, Jewish families in the Netherlands and many other places were able to build secret places in the homes and place of work. The most famous story of a Jewish family in hiding is that of Anne Frank and how she and her family were able to go two years living in that small space behind the bookshelf. This was a hard time for Jews because they had been hearing about what was going on and they knew what their fate would be if they were to be found by the Nazis, especially because they were hiding. According to the exhibit, Jews were summoned to Dutch labor camps and this led a lot of them to hide, but a lot of them did not because they did not have the connections or the means to do so. One fact that struck me was that from the estimated 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, 40,000 of them were able to go into hiding, and only about one third of them were found and arrested. By 1942/1943 almost all of the Jews in the Netherlands had been found and sent either to the camps or arrested. The Nazis were able to accomplish this because they had Dutch citizens help them for a portion of money for every Jew they reported to them or told their hiding spots. I had not known how much of a difficult situation it was in the Netherlands for Jews there and the types of things that they had to do in order to survive even just two more years of their lives. When reflecting upon this story of Anne Frank’s family and many others hiding, I thought back to when Stan Ronell came to our class and spoke to us about how he had survived the Holocaust. Stan was able to leave Krakow and go to another place in the hopes of hiding and not being found by the Nazis after his father and uncle were caught and taken to Auschwitz where they unfortunately died. When Stan’s mother got a job working in a house in Krakow, the agreement was only for her but she would not leave Stan behind so he had to hide in the house for a long time. The only place for him to stay was in a small closet and since he was not supposed to be in the house in the first place he never really got to see the light of day. The only time he left the closet was very late at night, to a fire escape, when he knew that there was no chance of him being caught. He had told us to go into a closet if we felt so called to, to imagine what it would have been like to be in such a small space for a long time. After going through Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and seeing the types of small spaces people were put in and the small rooms in which people him, I give these people that successfully hid and survived the war a lot of credit.

Photo of the Diary of Anne Frank available in the bookstore at Auschwitz 1. Anne Frank kept a diary of great detail about what it was like to live in hiding for two years.