Some one and a half million of the victims of the Holocaust were children. A small number survived on their own, but most were saved by programs like Kindertransport and One Thousand Children that removed them from their homeland and transported them to safer countries. Others became part of a group known as the Hidden Children. Their Jewish parents secretly gave them to non-Jewish families, and they assumed false identities.
One of the best nonfiction accounts of the subject is The Hidden Children: Secret Survivors of the Holocaust by psychologist Jane Marks. For a different sort of view into this dark story, there is now Zipora Klein Jakob’s biographical novel, The Forbidden Daughter, the True Story of a Holocaust Survivor, which chronicles the life of one hidden child, Elida Friedman. The novel’s central character, she has dark hair and eyes, which bodes ill for her.
Jakob sets her story in 1940s Lithuania. The Nazis have just murdered 5,000 Lithuanian Jews who were supposed to arrive in Kovno from Vilna (more commonly known in English today as Vilnius). Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife, Tzila, live in the Kovno ghetto with approximately 29,000 Lithuanian Jews and without running water. Disease is rampant, medicine is in short supply, food is scarce.
Some Jews had already run away from Kovno to join resistance groups in the nearby forests. Some escaped to Israel or the United States. But most of those who are no longer in the Kovno ghetto were sent to concentration and extermination camps. Some who reside in the ghetto had been university professors and now have jobs as policemen. The elderly and infirm help out as cooks, menders, and cobblers. A few people work as nurses and doctors.
Jonah is a doctor in the nearby hospital. He and his colleagues have been discussing the ethics of abortion, which was forbidden by Jewish law. The Nazis had recently decreed that Jewish women were not permitted to give birth. Those who became pregnant would have to abort or die. Most women accept this ruling because the circumstances at Kovno are deplorable.
Tzila Friedman, however, is desperate to have a child, and when she becomes pregnant, she refuses to abort even though Jonah pleads with her. Jonah agrees but makes a pact with his cousin, Lazar, to raise his baby if he dies during the war. Tzila hides her pregnancy, gives birth, and then hands her baby over to Stanislava, a Christian woman living on a farm. She asks only that, in the event of her death, Stanislava raise her daughter Jewish. This becomes a problem for Elida, who as an adolescent insists on converting to Catholicism.
Elida’s mental and physical journey forms the trajectory of The Forgotten Daughter. Ultimately, she grows up with three different families in several countries. Her name is changed three times. She suspects that the people she lives with are not her parents, but no one will tell her who she is. The only positive thing in her life is her brilliant mind and her gift for languages. During her time living in the United States, she earns several degrees, including a Ph.D. She would have done more except that she had to move because her husband changed jobs and because she had to care for her children.
Jakob, a cousin of Elida, was captivated by her and wanted to learn more about her past. She met her a few times during their childhood when Elida came from Vilna to visit her extended family in Israel, where Jakob lived. Although the two girls were about the same age, Elida did not share stories about herself, nor did she mingle with the other children. She read books and dressed in the plain clothes that her stepmother and stepfather had made for her.
Jakob and her teenage cousins often overheard bits of conversation among adult family members regarding World War II Lithuania and the Holocaust. But generally, the family was tight-lipped about the past. As Jakob explains, only a few aunts were forthcoming.
Ultimately, Jakob studied history at the university, driven to learn about Jewish life in Lithuania partly because her family, who had lived through the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, did not want to discuss the horrors of the Holocaust and partly because she wanted to learn more about Elida. Later, after Jakob and Elida became adults, they grow somewhat closer, although Elida never reveals much more.
Unfortunately, they have only a short time together. Elida and her husband suffer a tragic and untimely death, leaving their three sons to be raised by family members and leaving everyone bereft, especially Jakob, who hopes this novel will keep Elida’s memory alive.
Jakob researches letters, archives, magazines, newspapers, family documents, and secret troves of pictures to put together this book, which she calls a biographical novel. Weaving history with family archives, Jakob creates a story that is informative and engaging. Jakob’s coverage of Kovno and Vilna in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation is especially horrifying.
Unfortunately, the character of Elida seems flat through most of the narrative. It’s only in the final chapters, which describe Elida’s numerous letters to her adoptive parents, with whom she has a rocky relationship, that she comes alive. Much of the difficulty between the girl and her parents concerns Elida’s feelings that she wants to convert to Catholicism from Judaism. This is anathema to her Jewish family because her birth parents asked that she be raised Jewish, and the former, as extended family, have made such sacrifices to honor their wishes. The wonder: For what?
The end of this family story, warts and all, in Elida’s untimely death is related in an ironic way to the horrific circumstances of her early life. “Born in fire. Died in fire,” Jakob remembers the words spoken about Elida by her aunt. It is not a sunny story, and it is probably doomed not to be, but it is nonetheless a record, looked at another way, of survival.
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Diane Scharper is a frequent contributor to the Washington Examiner magazine. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins Osher Program.