Hiding and Jewish Identity

[Text: Robert spent the Second World War as a young child in hiding with a gentile family in the Netherlands. He describes becoming aware of his family’s Jewish identity after the war.] 

Robert Krell: I was too little to have had any kind of Jewish education. So, I didn’t begin to discover that until I lived with my parents and began to hear the stories of returning survivors who, somehow or other, all traipsed through our living room because they knew the Krells had not left. So, they looked for us. When they returned to the Hague, most of their homes were occupied by others. And so, we were almost a kind of reception centre. And I began to hear the stories of their experiences in camps and other places and began to hear the word Jew and what that meant and that this was the group of people singled out for this particular catastrophe.