by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

March 19, 2009

Like so many people who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, Suzanne Vromen didn’t talk about her wartime experience for decades. It wasn’t until her daughter — as a college student in the 1970s — began campaigning for courses on the Holocaust that Vromen questioned her own silence.

She, her parents, and her older brother escaped from Belgium in 1941. After a harrowing journey, they found safe haven in the Belgian Congo. Compared with those who went through the concentration camps, in the “hierarchy of victimization,” Vromen regarded her own families’ suffering as “inconsequential.”

She and her husband, Ben, made their home in the United States and brought up their two children here. She became a sociologist, focusing on women’s studies. But prompted by her daughter, she began to give workshops and seminars on the Holocaust, drawing on her own experience and extensive research.

That all came together in the book she published last year, Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (Oxford University Press).

Vromen, a professor emeritus of Bard College in New York, will discuss her research at the YM-YWHA of Union County on Sunday, March 22, at 1:30 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Y, National Council of Jewish Women Union County Section, the JCC of Central New Jersey, the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, and Kean University.

Vromen will also speak at Kean the next day, March 23, at two sessions sponsored by the university’s Human Rights Institute that are open to the public.

In a phone interview with NJ Jewish News last week, she talked about her life and her book, and the interplay of experience, memory, and identity. She spoke in English accented with a French lilt, framing a torrent of vivid descriptions with a blend of empathy and analytical clarity.

“People don’t talk when there isn’t a receptive audience,” she said. “Until the 1960s and the Eichmann trial, there really wasn’t a focus on what the Jews had gone through. The attitude was, ‘Yes, that was too bad; now get on with your lives.’ People were interested in restoring national honor, not in martyrs, or the stories of people who had died for no reason.”

Even when more and more stories of the concentration camps emerged, little attention was paid to the youngest survivors.

That all changed in 1991, with the first international gathering of hidden children. Vromen said, “As Deborah Dwork wrote about them, their ‘baggage had never been unpacked.’ For the first time, they began to talk to one another about their experiences, and to establish a collective memory.”

Vromen, who lives near Rhinebeck, in upstate New York, retired from teaching in 2000, and began to work on her book. With two Senior Specialist grants from the Fulbright program, she returned to her Belgium and delved into the stories of the Jewish children — between 3,000 and 5,000 — who were saved by the nuns there.

‘Besieged’

She brought to her book two very different aspects of her own wartime experience — the childhood trauma of being uprooted, and an intimate knowledge of Catholicism gleaned from her time in the Congo.

Forced to flee their comfortable, cultured life in Brussels, her family’s only lifeline was a work visa for the Belgian Congo passed on to her father by a man who worked for him in his film distribution business. They arrived in the equatorial heat of Elizabethville — now Lubumbashi — with almost nothing. Their sole stash of money was hidden in the leather wrapping around Suzanne’s tennis racket.

The young Suzanne was sent to school at a Catholic convent. At first, she found the religious environment very disorienting, she said, but she came to respect the nuns’ spiritual lifestyle. At 16, having just finished high school herself, she was asked to join the faculty, and for a while taught Latin, Greek, and English at the convent. Even as her own commitment to Zionism was growing, she came to recognize the powerful forces of socialization that bound the nuns.

Those same forces had played a major role in the Belgian convents where Jewish children were hidden from the Nazis. Vromen was able to probe the subject in a way others might not have been able to. She understood what pushed some of the hidden children to convert to Catholicism. Taking communion and adopting other rituals not only helped them escape detection, it also provided a desperately needed sense of belonging. Yet, for a complex web of reasons, other children stayed firmly rooted in their Judaism.

For Vromen, the return to her birth country involved a complex of deep conflicts. She encountered acceptance and respect on one hand, and tangible anti-Semitism on the other. “I felt besieged,” she said. She was grateful to return to the United States, to be back in a culture where — as one Belgian Jew said to her with envy — “you can be Jewish in public.”

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