Stealing Jewish Children during the Holocaust

B"H

In her book "Hidden in Thunder", Esther Farbstein quotes the following true story:

"One day our parents informed us that we were in for a surprise – Bitya amd her surrogate mother would be coming to visit us ! We were overjoyed to see Bitya, and our pleasure increased when we sensed that she felt comfortable with us at home. After eating lunch together, we recited the "Grace after the Meal – Bircat HaMazon". Mrs. Kersbergen followed suit by whispering some prayers while clasping her hands on the table and crossing herself repeatedly, but we were completely unprepared for what happened next. To our utter astonishment, Bitya followed Mrs. Kersbergen example. We were appalled – our sweet little Bitya praying like a Christian !

My parents rose and left the room. A short while later they returned and explained to Mrs. Kersbergen that although they had originally intended for Bitya to stay with her, they now felt that the situation was not as dangerous, and they had decided that Bitya would return to us. Mrs. Kersbergen was clearly surprised at this sudden turn of events, but she took it all in stride and left in a friendly and cheerful mood.

Father and Mother were visibly shaken. All they said to us was "We received you children as a deposit from Heaven. We do not know when we will be obligated to return our deposits, but one thing is certain – we will return you as Jews !"

Bitya returned her soul to her Maker in Bergen – Belsen in February 1945, at the age of five years and four months. She did so as a Jewish girl, as her parents had vowed.

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Many new Halachic questions came up during the Holocaust. Among them was the question if Jewish parents should hand over their children to Christian families or give them into convents. Most Jewish religious families, however, never thought about giving their children away to Christians.

Especially the Catholic convents in Eastern Europe didn't accept Jewish children just out of love; the nuns had a firm agenda which was doing the best to convert Jewish children to Christianity. Extreme Christians call this "saving souls in order to bring about the second coming of their false Meshiach J.C."
Already after the few days at the convent, Jewish children were systematically baptised.

Wasn't it enough that the Nazis did "their best" to exterminate the Jewish people ? Now also the church came up with its plan not only to destroy Jewish lives but also Jewish souls.
Esther Farbstein quotes a story in her book where Jewish children accepted by a covenant were led into a prayer room where they were told that this is a "Synagogue". The room was neither a church nor a synagogue but simple a room for missionizing Jewish children. Here they were taught a new kind of prayer. Prayers to the false Meschiach J. C. How can young children to be expected making a difference between Judaism and idol worship ?

After the war, on 10th February 1946, Rabbi Herzog met Pope Pius XII. and asked him to instruct his follower to return Jewish children from Catholic convents. The appeal was in vain and from an estimated 5000 Jewish children, only half was returned.
And half of the children were mostly not returned because the convents were willing to do so. Instead, different Rabbis went from convent to convent and found out by themselves, which one of the children was Jewish. Many convents denied having accepted Jewish children.

It needs to be mentioned that there were definitely some Christian families who did mean well and not everyone was so fanatically into this idea of missionizing helpless Jewish children and, thus exploiting the war time situation. However, Catholicism used to be extremely important and influential in Eastern Europe in those days and especially convents followed the church rules. Rules whose goal ii is to missionize all Jews to Christianity. The same rules existed in the Middle Ages and the same rules exist today when fanatic Christians come to Jerusalem in order to missionize or Evangelists preach their "Freedom for Jerusalem". There is no difference and the churches haven't changed.

To quote Primo Levi:
"What kind of church is that" ?


Wasn't handing the children over in a Christian environment like a capitulation to Hitler's plan to destroy and kill the Jews ?
Yes, it was and since then, nothing has changed.

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Here is an article by Daniel Goldhagen with a claim, the Vatican vehemently denies on the Internet:



Did the Pope 'steal' Holocaust children?

A 1946 Vatican letter was an attempt to stop the return of children to their Jewish families

By Daniel Goldhagen

Imagine that a person, at some risk to himself, saves an infant from a burning car in a rural area. The parents are dead. We would call him a hero.

But then he decides to keep the child and raise her in his god’s way. The man does not inform the authorities. When the desperate child’s relatives come looking for her, even knocking on his door, he denies any knowledge of the child’s whereabouts. The man’s initial good deed has become a crime. He is a kidnapper.

A document from the archives of the French Roman Catholic Church has just been published that reveals Pope Pius XII to have been like this man when Jewish relatives came frantically knocking, demanding their children. In October 1946 a letter containing papal instructions was sent to the papal nuncio in France, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

He was a man of known compassion for Jews, who was working to reunite Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions during the Holocaust with parents, relatives and Jewish institutions. The letter ordered Roncalli to desist and to hold on to the Jewish children: “Those children who have been baptised cannot be entrusted to institutions that are unable to ensure a Christian education.”

Pius XII’s intent to deprive Jewish parents of their children was unequivocal: “If the children have been entrusted (to the church) by their parents, and if the parents now claim them back, they can be returned, provided the children themselves have not been baptised. It should be noted that this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.”

Not returning baptised Jewish children was thus presented as a general church principle and policy decided upon by the church’s authoritative Congregation and personally approved by Pope Pius XII. So it stands to reason that this policy was to be implemented across Europe.

It is still not known to what extent Roncalli or other church officials actually implemented the Vatican directive. The documents relevant to the church’s policy remain sequestered in the archives of the Vatican and in the archives of the national churches.

During the Holocaust unknown thousands of Jewish children had gained refuge in Catholic monasteries, convents and schools — though not at the behest of the Pope. They were saved by local heroes, priests and nuns, who also baptised an unknown number of the children under their care.

It is well known that Jewish survivors, in many though not all cases, had great difficulty retrieving their children. But it was only suspected that the church had a policy of stealing these Jewish children for Jesus.

Now we have a smoking gun: this chilling document. It reveals that the Pope’s and the church’s policy was, in effect, to kidnap Jewish children, perhaps by the thousands. It exhibits Pius XII’s callousness towards the suffering of Jews and its plain purpose was to implement a plan that would victimise the Jews a second time by depriving these survivors of the Nazi hell of their own children.

The document cannot surprise anyone familiar with the Catholic church during this period. But it does remove what Pius XII had enjoyed: plausible deniability. For 60 years the church and its officials have worked hard to deny the many crimes and outrages against Jews before, during and after the Holocaust committed by Pius XII, bishops and priests.

Pius XII and the church kept this policy of denying Jewish parents their children secret from the world, because they knew that it would be seen as outrageous and criminal. Yet religious robes should not cloak a person and his deeds from being called plainly what they are. The recent priestly sex abuse scandals have taught us this. They have also taught us that transparency is necessary for this most secretive of churches.

If the church is the moral institution it claims to be then it must take measures to redress this: the Vatican should establish and fund a fully independent commission of outside historical, ecclesiastical and forensic experts, led by a person of international stature, to determine how many Jewish children the church did not return and the role that Pius XII, cardinals and bishops played. The commission should be granted full access to all church institutions, personnel and documents.

Pope John Paul II, who has worked hard to improve the church’s bearing towards Jews, should publicly instruct all national European Catholic churches to co-operate fully with the investigators and to unearth what happened in their parishes.

For the church is an institution that records and preserves one thing above all else faithfully: baptisms. Upon identification, all Jewish victims or their survivors should be located by the church and notified. The commission should also publish detailed historical reports of its findings.

If Switzerland could do this with its Bergier Commission for the theft of Jewish assets during the war, and if Australia can do this for the children its government stole from Aborigines during the same period, the Catholic church can do this now. And the Vatican should finally stop the decades-long stalling and obfuscating about fully opening its own and its national churches’ archives covering the Holocaust period to scholars and journalists. It should also stop pretending that its sole transgression was not having done more to save Jews, and that its sole act of public penitence need be issuing wan apologies for its acts of omission. Surely this papal letter to Roncalli is not the only incriminating document in the church’s vast secret archives.

Finally, it should now be clear that the church should cease efforts to canonise Pius XII. He oversaw a church that, during the war, continued centuries-old practices of anti-semitism, knowing that the Jews were being persecuted and slaughtered. He presided over a church where German priests used its genealogical records to help the Nazis determine whom to persecute as a Jew and that officially continued for more than a decade after the Holocaust to teach that all Jews for all time are guilty as Christ-killers.

And with this authoritative church document from its own archives we know that Pius XII effectively made himself into one of the most rampant would-be kidnappers of modern times not to mention a person bereft of human empathy for the Jewish parents in search of their children after years of suffering.

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s memoir and commentary on the character of humanity was If This Is a Man. How can we not ask: if this is a saint, then what kind of church is this?

Daniel Goldhagen is the author of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust