THE JOURNEY OF A HIDDEN CHILD

Pila chronicles the grim experience of his Jewish parents during World War II in this nonfiction work.

The author grew up believing that his father’s name was Serge de Russ, that he was a French Catholic, and that he ultimately perished in a POW camp during WWII; this was the story he had always been told by his mother, Rosa, born Ruchla Laja Sat in Poland in 1911. However, in his twilight years (Pila is an octogenarian), he decided to research his parents’ past, and discovered that his mother’s account was thoroughly fabricated: His father was born Szapsa Russ, and, like Pila’s mother, he was a Jew native to Poland. Moreover, Szapsa did not die in a POW camp, but was arrested and sent to concentration camps; he would ultimately perish in one. With journalistic meticulousness and dramatic poignancy, the author reconstructs the experience of his parents, both of whom worked for the resistance in Belgium. As a result of the danger they faced, Pila stayed for years with his parents’ best friends, Gerard and Germaine Decraene, whom he believed, at time, were his father and mother. To conceal his Jewishness—the author was circumcised—he was disguised as a girl. Pila reflects profoundly and candidly on discovering the truth about his father and the ways in which that revelation disoriented his conception of himself: “Learning of the camps he had been in didn’t alter my sense of identity, but learning of his Judaism did. Even though I have lived my life proudly as a Jew since rejoining my mother, in terms of my sense of self, I still felt half Catholic. It’s hard to let go of a part of yourself after almost 80 years.” In addition to these introspective ruminations, Pila depicts, with unflagging realism, the barbarism of the concentration camps in which both his mother and father suffered. This is a remarkable story that thoughtfully highlights the seemingly inexhaustible reverberations of the Holocaust into the present and future.

A moving memoir coupled with a rigorous historical study.