Hidden Child
by Ralph Berets
I have never had a happy-go-lucky personality. My family and I were hidden, mostly by farmers, in The Netherlands from December 1942 until May 1945, and I don’t know if these holocaust experiences instilled a pessimistic perspective into my outlook on life or if it would have been there anyway. Even now, thoughts about the war and how difficult it was to survive are never far from my consciousness. I don’t live in that world anymore, but it creeps up on me whenever I am hungry, scared, lonely or afraid. Images of what happened during my childhood are there to remind me of how precarious life can be and how fortunate I am to be alive, but what should go along with this, gratitude for my salvation, is not part of how I keep re-experiencing my past.
One particular memory, possibly my first, is especially powerful. When I was three-and-a half, we were hiding in a cabin on a farm owned by a father and his three sons. One night, one of the younger sons came running up to our cabin to warn us that the Nazis were coming. We managed to hide in a field near the cabin, and, because there was a terrible rainstorm that night, the Nazis didn’t search very hard for us, and we were not caught. However, the next morning, we had to leave because it wasn’t safe for us there anymore, and, as we passed the farmer’s barn, we looked in and saw the oldest son hanging from the rafters. The son had been hanged by his own brothers, at the father’s behest, because he was the one who had betrayed us to the Nazis, and also because they were afraid, if they let him live, he would betray them too.
When I was growing up, I often thought about suicide. I had no joy of life experiences that made me feel like life was worthwhile. I was oppressed with how awful things were, how little I cared about things that made others happy, such as presents, smoking, alcohol or goofing off. I didn’t fit anywhere and didn’t really think I would ever find a niche where I would feel comfortable. How many times did I need to feel rejected and left out before I would just accept that belonging anywhere, period, was not likely to happen? Still, I struggled valiantly to hold myself together. I liked school because I liked to learn new things and I enjoyed playing sports, which was really my salvation when I was a teenager.
Looking back at myself as I was when I was younger, I’m not sure I would be able to befriend myself. I was extremely self-conscious, hardly aware of any of my own emotions and totally reluctant to communicate how I felt with anyone, especially not my mother, who at least tried to find out what I was upset about (my father never made an attempt), but I would never let her in. I now think this was a power play on my part. It was the way I could keep her interested without revealing anything about myself that might have been rejected or questioned. I didn’t do this consciously, but intuitively. Because I had become so good at hiding during the war, I continued to protect myself by hiding, now not just my body, but also my emotions and my feelings. After I met my wife, and as a result of her constant pressure, I finally discovered that there was something inside that I could reveal and it would not necessarily shatter the image I had created for myself. It took years for me to acknowledge the validity of this part of myself.
When I was sixteen, I was closely attached to my sister, whose boyfriend, later fiancée, then husband, also became a good friend. I spent an inordinate amount of time with them. I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen and my sister frequently asked me to drive them around as they necked in the backseat. My future brother-in-law had a Pontiac convertible which I truly enjoyed driving, but watching them making out was not enjoyable, especially since I did not have a girlfriend. My sister, during and after WWII, always kept me company and, having a much more upbeat personality, kept me entertained and active. Although she was not a good athlete herself, she tried to help me with my baseball skills by pitching to me or catching my attempts to throw a curveball. Her fiancée was an engineer and he taught me a great deal about electricity, mechanics and how to fix anything that was broken. We spent hours together puttering and fixing cars, bikes, boats and switches.
Between my junior and senior years, they got married and spent six weeks in Europe on their honeymoon. My parents and I also went to Holland for the wedding, but I only stayed a week because I had to go back to school after the Labor Day holiday. My parents stayed in Europe for an extra two weeks, and I returned home to face myself and the house which, it seemed then, deliberately ‘rebelled’ against me.
I came home from a long, exhausting 12-hour flight. By then, I had been driving for nine months, and doing that made me feel like an adult and gave me a sense of freedom which I previously had not experienced, so I felt good about being on my own, was extremely happy to be home and looked forward to plopping down into my bed. I had missed a week of school and was anticipating being overwhelmed by what I had missed, but I certainly did not anticipate what was to happen next. Getting ready for bed, I used the toilet, and when I flushed, extremely hot water came gushing out and kept gushing for several minutes. I tried filling the bathtub to relieve some of the pressure, but that didn’t work. I held the control arm from the toilet tank, but it was so hot, I couldn’t hold on. The shutoff valve under the toilet tank was corroded, and it broke when I tried to shut it off. My hands were badly burned. The bathroom floor had several inches of standing water, and it leaked downstairs into the hallway.
I finally decided to look for the main shutoff valve, which I thought was in the basement, but it turned out to be outside in front of the house. It took me ten minutes to find it and then finding the right tool to shut off the water was another problem. What was I going to do to clean up this mess? I called a 24-hour plumbing service, but all I got was a very tired voice and the person was not helpful at all, especially once he found out that I had almost no money to pay. My parents had given me $50 for two weeks’ worth of food, and that was not going to cover emergency plumbing repairs. When I told him the story, the plumber laughed and said I was hallucinating or fantasizing because he had never heard of hot water coming out of a toilet.
Reflecting back on this experience, I now realize that I felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Goethe’s story. Instead of going to bed, I spent the next six hours struggling to mop up all the water that had flooded the bathroom, much of the second floor and the hallway in the main entryway. I collected all the towels I could find and used them to absorb the water. It was still extremely hot, and I was afraid to wait until it cooled off because I assumed the damage would just get worse. So I put on my galoshes and some rubber gloves, waded through the water and absorbed as much as I could, and wrung the towels out in the bathtub. I spent several hours doing this and, when I was finished, was surprised at how little damage there was.
I was relieved when the cleanup was completed, but I was also totally exhausted. After getting home at seven PM, I had spent nearly eight hours cleaning and, when I finally went to sleep at three AM, I wasn’t seeing or thinking clearly. I don’t know if I set the alarm. I do know that, if I did, I did not hear it and didn’t wake up until four PM the next afternoon. I was embarrassed about what had happened and didn’t know how to explain it to the Principal, since I was supposed to have been back in class on Monday, not Tuesday. As a consequence, I missed a Spanish test and the teacher would not allow me to make it up, so I received the only B+ on my report card on my high school record; the rest were all A’s. I graduated with a 4.27 average, but always wondered if I was rejected by Stanford because of this one deficit and that became a focal point for me.
As I looked around the house the next day, I discovered that my cleanup job was not as good as I originally thought. The caulking around the bathroom tiles was buckled, some of the paint was peeling, the ceiling in the lower hallway was spotted, and later I discovered that the light switch in the hall had shorted out. So I had a lot of work to do before my parents got home in two weeks. I was also being pressured by my friends to have a party at my house, but I knew if I did that it would be a disaster. Luckily, I convinced them that this would not be a good idea and that my aunt and uncle were staying with me to make sure I was okay. That was a fabrication. I have never been a good liar, but I got away with that one. I never told my friends about the flooding, because I anticipated that they would give me a hard time and make it more difficult for me to do the cleanup.
I had always been interested in fixing things, so now I had the opportunity to demonstrate to myself that I was actually good at it. I fixed the caulking, the painting, the wiring and the patching. It took me eight afternoons and evenings to accomplish my tasks, but for some reason the whole process also depressed me. I had spent most of my $50 food money on supplies to fix the house. When I was done late Friday afternoon, I slumped down onto the couch to watch television. I don’t remember what I saw, but I do remember that it was depressing. I made something to eat, but it did not taste good.
I felt really tired and depressed and, almost without thinking, grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer. I felt I really did not want to live any longer and so spent fifteen minutes deciding what would be the most effective place for me to stab myself. I had previously thought about suicide, but never realistically. I had struggled valiantly for years to fit an image that did not really belong to me, but this was the first time I literally took an implement and seriously contemplated what it might feel like to no longer be.
I always felt that, for some inexplicable reason, I had been persecuted from birth, that life had little meaning and that the best thing to be anticipated in the future would be death, a time when there would be no more pain, fear or anxiety. I pricked myself a few times with the knife to make sure that I could get it between my ribs. I tested it by waiting to see the blood come flowing out and tried to see how that would feel. I was numb, I felt nothing. I stabbed harder and more blood came out, and I realized suddenly that if I did not succeed in killing myself, I would have to clean the blood up, too. So I tried pushing harder, but lacked the strength or the willpower to go through with it. Then, with the blade still in and my mind wandering off, I somehow decided that this was not really what I wanted.
Then I recalled that image of the farmer’s son hanging from the rafters. I remembered looking closely at the agony on his face and, with a shock, I realized that what I really wanted was to get out of there, to go elsewhere, to start anew with no attachment to the past with all those haunting memories. I knew I might have to wait a year to do it, but now I was determined to try.
I bandaged myself, washed my clothes, cleaned the floor and the couch and put everything back the way it was supposed to be. Strangely, I felt better for having tried to put an end to things as they were and realized that maybe my life could still change and the future might be better than the past. I fooled my parents when they came home; they never realized there had been a flood. Then I endured the last year of high school by daydreaming about a future that I did not know but that would be radically different from the past that I had endured for too long. Fortunately for me, once I was away from home, from my parents, from my school friends and from all associations with my heritage, the world did look somewhat brighter and more hopeful.
One particular memory, possibly my first, is especially powerful. When I was three-and-a half, we were hiding in a cabin on a farm owned by a father and his three sons. One night, one of the younger sons came running up to our cabin to warn us that the Nazis were coming. We managed to hide in a field near the cabin, and, because there was a terrible rainstorm that night, the Nazis didn’t search very hard for us, and we were not caught. However, the next morning, we had to leave because it wasn’t safe for us there anymore, and, as we passed the farmer’s barn, we looked in and saw the oldest son hanging from the rafters. The son had been hanged by his own brothers, at the father’s behest, because he was the one who had betrayed us to the Nazis, and also because they were afraid, if they let him live, he would betray them too.
When I was growing up, I often thought about suicide. I had no joy of life experiences that made me feel like life was worthwhile. I was oppressed with how awful things were, how little I cared about things that made others happy, such as presents, smoking, alcohol or goofing off. I didn’t fit anywhere and didn’t really think I would ever find a niche where I would feel comfortable. How many times did I need to feel rejected and left out before I would just accept that belonging anywhere, period, was not likely to happen? Still, I struggled valiantly to hold myself together. I liked school because I liked to learn new things and I enjoyed playing sports, which was really my salvation when I was a teenager.
Looking back at myself as I was when I was younger, I’m not sure I would be able to befriend myself. I was extremely self-conscious, hardly aware of any of my own emotions and totally reluctant to communicate how I felt with anyone, especially not my mother, who at least tried to find out what I was upset about (my father never made an attempt), but I would never let her in. I now think this was a power play on my part. It was the way I could keep her interested without revealing anything about myself that might have been rejected or questioned. I didn’t do this consciously, but intuitively. Because I had become so good at hiding during the war, I continued to protect myself by hiding, now not just my body, but also my emotions and my feelings. After I met my wife, and as a result of her constant pressure, I finally discovered that there was something inside that I could reveal and it would not necessarily shatter the image I had created for myself. It took years for me to acknowledge the validity of this part of myself.
When I was sixteen, I was closely attached to my sister, whose boyfriend, later fiancée, then husband, also became a good friend. I spent an inordinate amount of time with them. I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen and my sister frequently asked me to drive them around as they necked in the backseat. My future brother-in-law had a Pontiac convertible which I truly enjoyed driving, but watching them making out was not enjoyable, especially since I did not have a girlfriend. My sister, during and after WWII, always kept me company and, having a much more upbeat personality, kept me entertained and active. Although she was not a good athlete herself, she tried to help me with my baseball skills by pitching to me or catching my attempts to throw a curveball. Her fiancée was an engineer and he taught me a great deal about electricity, mechanics and how to fix anything that was broken. We spent hours together puttering and fixing cars, bikes, boats and switches.
Between my junior and senior years, they got married and spent six weeks in Europe on their honeymoon. My parents and I also went to Holland for the wedding, but I only stayed a week because I had to go back to school after the Labor Day holiday. My parents stayed in Europe for an extra two weeks, and I returned home to face myself and the house which, it seemed then, deliberately ‘rebelled’ against me.
I came home from a long, exhausting 12-hour flight. By then, I had been driving for nine months, and doing that made me feel like an adult and gave me a sense of freedom which I previously had not experienced, so I felt good about being on my own, was extremely happy to be home and looked forward to plopping down into my bed. I had missed a week of school and was anticipating being overwhelmed by what I had missed, but I certainly did not anticipate what was to happen next. Getting ready for bed, I used the toilet, and when I flushed, extremely hot water came gushing out and kept gushing for several minutes. I tried filling the bathtub to relieve some of the pressure, but that didn’t work. I held the control arm from the toilet tank, but it was so hot, I couldn’t hold on. The shutoff valve under the toilet tank was corroded, and it broke when I tried to shut it off. My hands were badly burned. The bathroom floor had several inches of standing water, and it leaked downstairs into the hallway.
I finally decided to look for the main shutoff valve, which I thought was in the basement, but it turned out to be outside in front of the house. It took me ten minutes to find it and then finding the right tool to shut off the water was another problem. What was I going to do to clean up this mess? I called a 24-hour plumbing service, but all I got was a very tired voice and the person was not helpful at all, especially once he found out that I had almost no money to pay. My parents had given me $50 for two weeks’ worth of food, and that was not going to cover emergency plumbing repairs. When I told him the story, the plumber laughed and said I was hallucinating or fantasizing because he had never heard of hot water coming out of a toilet.
Reflecting back on this experience, I now realize that I felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Goethe’s story. Instead of going to bed, I spent the next six hours struggling to mop up all the water that had flooded the bathroom, much of the second floor and the hallway in the main entryway. I collected all the towels I could find and used them to absorb the water. It was still extremely hot, and I was afraid to wait until it cooled off because I assumed the damage would just get worse. So I put on my galoshes and some rubber gloves, waded through the water and absorbed as much as I could, and wrung the towels out in the bathtub. I spent several hours doing this and, when I was finished, was surprised at how little damage there was.
I was relieved when the cleanup was completed, but I was also totally exhausted. After getting home at seven PM, I had spent nearly eight hours cleaning and, when I finally went to sleep at three AM, I wasn’t seeing or thinking clearly. I don’t know if I set the alarm. I do know that, if I did, I did not hear it and didn’t wake up until four PM the next afternoon. I was embarrassed about what had happened and didn’t know how to explain it to the Principal, since I was supposed to have been back in class on Monday, not Tuesday. As a consequence, I missed a Spanish test and the teacher would not allow me to make it up, so I received the only B+ on my report card on my high school record; the rest were all A’s. I graduated with a 4.27 average, but always wondered if I was rejected by Stanford because of this one deficit and that became a focal point for me.
As I looked around the house the next day, I discovered that my cleanup job was not as good as I originally thought. The caulking around the bathroom tiles was buckled, some of the paint was peeling, the ceiling in the lower hallway was spotted, and later I discovered that the light switch in the hall had shorted out. So I had a lot of work to do before my parents got home in two weeks. I was also being pressured by my friends to have a party at my house, but I knew if I did that it would be a disaster. Luckily, I convinced them that this would not be a good idea and that my aunt and uncle were staying with me to make sure I was okay. That was a fabrication. I have never been a good liar, but I got away with that one. I never told my friends about the flooding, because I anticipated that they would give me a hard time and make it more difficult for me to do the cleanup.
I had always been interested in fixing things, so now I had the opportunity to demonstrate to myself that I was actually good at it. I fixed the caulking, the painting, the wiring and the patching. It took me eight afternoons and evenings to accomplish my tasks, but for some reason the whole process also depressed me. I had spent most of my $50 food money on supplies to fix the house. When I was done late Friday afternoon, I slumped down onto the couch to watch television. I don’t remember what I saw, but I do remember that it was depressing. I made something to eat, but it did not taste good.
I felt really tired and depressed and, almost without thinking, grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer. I felt I really did not want to live any longer and so spent fifteen minutes deciding what would be the most effective place for me to stab myself. I had previously thought about suicide, but never realistically. I had struggled valiantly for years to fit an image that did not really belong to me, but this was the first time I literally took an implement and seriously contemplated what it might feel like to no longer be.
I always felt that, for some inexplicable reason, I had been persecuted from birth, that life had little meaning and that the best thing to be anticipated in the future would be death, a time when there would be no more pain, fear or anxiety. I pricked myself a few times with the knife to make sure that I could get it between my ribs. I tested it by waiting to see the blood come flowing out and tried to see how that would feel. I was numb, I felt nothing. I stabbed harder and more blood came out, and I realized suddenly that if I did not succeed in killing myself, I would have to clean the blood up, too. So I tried pushing harder, but lacked the strength or the willpower to go through with it. Then, with the blade still in and my mind wandering off, I somehow decided that this was not really what I wanted.
Then I recalled that image of the farmer’s son hanging from the rafters. I remembered looking closely at the agony on his face and, with a shock, I realized that what I really wanted was to get out of there, to go elsewhere, to start anew with no attachment to the past with all those haunting memories. I knew I might have to wait a year to do it, but now I was determined to try.
I bandaged myself, washed my clothes, cleaned the floor and the couch and put everything back the way it was supposed to be. Strangely, I felt better for having tried to put an end to things as they were and realized that maybe my life could still change and the future might be better than the past. I fooled my parents when they came home; they never realized there had been a flood. Then I endured the last year of high school by daydreaming about a future that I did not know but that would be radically different from the past that I had endured for too long. Fortunately for me, once I was away from home, from my parents, from my school friends and from all associations with my heritage, the world did look somewhat brighter and more hopeful.
