The Holocaust's Other Lost Children

On March 4 of this year the Vatican announced that it would finally open the papacy archives of Pius XII, the pope whose tenure from 1939 until 1958, covered the years of the Second World War. This step has been a long time coming and historians hope that it will finally shed light on the actions taken by Pius XII and the Catholic Church as Jews were being rounded up and slaughtered in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

"The Church is not afraid of history," declared Pope Francis, the current leader of the Vatican, of the decision to open the previously secret archives to the public. And, indeed, in the years since the war the Catholic Church has taken measures to publicly confront its own long history of institutional anti-Semitism. Starting with the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Church officially condemned anti-Semitism and absolved Jews of the charge of deicide, formally renouncing the charge that they bear any collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus. But those steps toward atonement and reconciliation do not actually illuminate the Vatican's role during the Holocaust, a period of contested history during which, critics say, Pius XII veered between inaction and complicity toward the crimes of the Nazis.

Foremost among the lingering questions that Jewish leaders hope will be resolved by the newly opened archives, are the names and birthplaces of Jewish children placed for safekeeping with Catholic families or Catholic institutions (monasteries, convents, schools) during the war. Many of those children were converted to Catholicism, an act that may have helped save their lives. But prominent Jewish leaders like Abraham Foxman, former head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), believe that even after the war, when it was safe to come out of hiding, most were not told they were Jews. In many instances, the children were the only members of their families to survive—but there were other cases where surviving relatives did exist, and sought in vain for the remnants of their devastated families.