publicity. She now must rework
her sense of her identity at the
same time that she must con-
tend with a challenging and
sometimes. intrusive press.
What the world must still
learn is how, common such late
discoveries are. They take many
forms and occur at many points
in the lives of children whose
parents hid them during the
Holocaust, survived it or escaped
from it.
. The Holocaust's hidden chil-
dren are in a category of their
own. Desperately placed by their
Jewish parents in the care of
convents or of brave gentiles
willing to shelter them, these
children, many of whose parents
didn't survive to recover them
after the war, often didn't learn
until late in life — and probably,
in some cases, still haven't
learned — of their origins.
• Jewish adults who survived
the Holocaust, and who reared
offspring in the post-Holocaust
world, learned from that expe-
rience the lesson that being Jew-
ish could be, under certain
circumstances, a fatal condition.
Some of these parents, especial-
ly those who remained in East-
ern Europe after the Holocaust,
sought to spare their children
the dangers of such a fate.
They changed their names,
took on new religions and at-

tempted to melt into a world in
which nearly all of their rela-
tives had been killed. Some of
the children of these parents,
like some of the children who
had survived the Holocaust
after being hidden, didn't
learn of their origins until late
in life — and some probably
still haven't learned of them.
Of those who did learn their
true roots, some weren't told
about them until their adult-
hoods, occasionally during
deathbed revelations by their
parents; some discovered
them while sifting through
their deceased parents' pa-
pers; and some heard about
them during chance encoun-
ters with others who had
known their parents decades
before.
And some of these chil-
dren, sensing holes in their
family histories and sus-
pecting the truth, did re- • •
search of their own until' '
they confirmed it.
Yet other parents, managing
to flee Europe before the Holo-
caust, also sought to protect
their children from the menace
of a lethally anti-Semitic world
by refashioning their ethnic and
religious identities in order to
spare their children from the
burden of knowing about their
true origins — origins that, were

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who had always thought they
were ethnic Poles, Romanians,
Hungarians or Czechs finally
have discovered, sometimes in
dramatic and stunning ways,
their true identities as Jews.
And such discoveries have oc-
curred even in America; some of
the Jewish parents who immi-
grated to these shores after the
Holocaust brought with them
the memories of the European
inferno and the fears that it
could ignite again anywhere
and any time, including in a
country that has itself not been
free of anti-Semitism.
The concern of these par-
ents was not only for them-
selves but also for their
children. They had the sense
0 that their children's ignorance
of their true identities would
confer upon them a certain
. degree of protection from
4 the consequences of anti-
, Semitic prejudice, espe-
cially if it ever were to
become, once again, lethal.
Many also felt that, in the
wake of the Holocaust, and the
centuries of anti-Semitic policies
in Europe and elsewhere, it
was simply easier to live as a
non-Jew. It may be hard, espe-
cially in America, to understand
such thinking now, but it's not
hard to understand it in the con-
text of the Holocaust period and

,

they known to others, might
someday damage, and even end,
their children's lives.
Ms. Albright's parents appear
to have made this kind of delib-
erate, and painful, decision.
In recent years, many persons

the decades following World War
II.
Jewish parents who were con-
fronted by the Holocaust, or who
lived through it, can hardly be
faulted for their efforts to save
their lives or preserve the wel-
fare of their children by hiding
their origins, whether during the
Holocaust or even after. And
their children can hardly be
blamed for the life-preserving ef-
forts of their parents, knowledge
of which sometimes came to
them very late. In these ways
the children, like their parents,
were victims of the ferocious
anti-Semitism that systemati-
cally destroyed the Jews of Eu-
rope in our century.
The children, no less than the
parents, deserve our under-
standing and our sympathy.
And when, like Madeleine Al-
bright, the children discover as-
pects of their origins many years
after they have formed a sense
of who and what they are, only
they can fully weigh the impli-
cations for themselves, and
choose, or avoid choosing, to pur-
sue that knowledge.
In the end, they deserve the
precious privacy that all of us
must have when new knowledge
forces us to reconsider, reinte-
grate and refashion the deepest
things we know about our his-
tories and ourselves. ❑

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