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<\/p>\nAs a hidden child in the Holocaust, Robert Krell grew up silent and Christian in Nazi-occupied Holland. <\/p>\n
Krell was just two years old when his parents, Leo and Emmy Krell, were ordered to report for resettlement in the east. The Krells, however, knew that no one who co-operated with the Nazis ever returned so they left their only son with a neighbour and went into hiding in The Hague.<\/p>\n
It was August 1942. <\/p>\n
Krell ended up in the home of Albert and Violette Munnik and their 12-year-old daughter, Nora, all of whom risked their lives to protect him. (Krell\u2019s father, a furrier, went into hiding in the attic of his business partner, while his mother lived alone in another part of the city with false papers.)<\/p>\n
Robert Krell became Robbie Munnik. He did not leave the apartment. \u201cI was a very dark, curly-haired kid in a family of blonds so I could not have been spotted by anyone,\u201d he says. \u201cThere were people looking for that kind of thing. Betrayal in Holland was a big business.\u201d<\/p>\n
About 90 per cent of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied territories did not survive the war. Many of them, including the Holocaust\u2019s most famous child victim, Anne Frank, were betrayed to the Germans. <\/p>\n
Krell stayed hidden and never complained: \u201cI did not cry \u2014 ever,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
By the time The Hague was liberated by Canadian soldiers in May 1945, five-year-old Krell had forgotten his own family. <\/p>\n
Miraculously, his parents had survived the war, but his reunion with them was distressing. \u201cI was given into hiding by my Jewish parents and now I had to leave my Christian parents for my Jewish parents,\u201d he remembers. <\/p>\n
For four decades, Krell, like thousands of other child survivors, did not talk about his painful, fragmentary Holocaust memories.<\/p>\n
He emigrated to Canada in 1951, and even as he built a successful psychiatric practice in Vancouver \u2014 he specialized in treating traumatized Holocaust survivors \u2014 he did not share his own experience. He didn\u2019t consider himself a survivor. <\/p>\n
That changed in 1981 at an event in Jerusalem, when he heard Rabbi Israel Meier Lau describe how he had emerged from the Buchenwald concentration camp at the age of eight. In that instant, Krell recognized he, too, was a Holocaust survivor. He was not much older than Lau at liberation.<\/p>\n
Wondering where all of the other child survivors were, he co-founded a child survivors\u2019 group and helped launch the First International Gathering of Child Survivors in New York City in 1991. About 1,600 people attended the event. <\/p>\n
\u201cChild survivors became public again after hiding for 40 years,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was an extraordinary act of healing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many child survivors, he discovered, were struggling to come to terms with dark memories, with lost childhoods, with death and grief and trauma: \u201cThat kind of trauma attacks normalcy. It attacks the chance to group up normally, to play outside, to have toys, to have childhood time. Silence was the language of the child survivor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Krell, now 77 and an emeritus professor at The University of British Columbia, will be in Ottawa next week to mark the inauguration of the National Holocaust Monument. It is a day he has been anticipating for decades. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very meaningful moment,\u201d he says. \u201cWith respect to the aging of Holocaust survivors, it\u2019s late in the day, and it\u2019s reassuring to see our country provide something so permanent in its capital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Krell, founder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, a teaching museum, will speak about child survivors at an event after the official inauguration on Sept. 27. <\/p>\n
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Heritage Minister M\u00e9lanie Joly will be among the dignitaries to attend the monument\u2019s official unveiling. It\u2019s the largest new monument to be built in the capital in more than 70 years.<\/p>\n
The Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship is hosting a special program to mark the inauguration of the National Holocaust Monument on Sept 27 at 7 p.m. at Library and Archives Canada. The program will feature the screening of recorded survivors\u2019 testimonials, and presentations by Rabbi Daniel Friedman, chair of the monument development council, and Dr. Robert Krell.<\/p>\n
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