When the war began, Anita and her family lived in Breda, the Netherlands. With the 1940 German occupation, they went into hiding and took on new names that shielded their Jewish identity. Anita and her brother first were hidden in a non-Jewish neighbor's home, and later by a Quaker family near Utrecht. Anita, her parents, brother, and two sisters survived the war.
My brother and I were taken away and taken to a family in the same town we lived in, and we stayed there for two weeks. And, uh, was...they lived in a house that...and again in Holland because it's so such a crowded country, several families would live in the, in the same house, so we lived on the second floor of this house and there were another family living on the first floor. The family on the first floor did not know that we were on the second floor. So for two weeks we could not move. I remember we slept in the bathtub. We could not talk. We could not move. We couldn't do anything because we were told that if they, the people downstairs, would find out that we were upstairs, we'd be killed. And we...I remember also that sometimes they would take us out at twelve o'clock at night just to give us some fresh air. So we'd, we'd go outside and that was, that was a very hard time because in the mean...you know, we had no idea where our parents were. I mean there is a six-year-old and a nine-year-old just taken away, totally, from parents, sisters, and everything else and, and, and yet we knew, you know. There was no crying. There was no whining. There was nothing. There was just obedience.
How do oral histories differ from other primary sources such as artifacts, documents, and photographs? What can we learn from different types of primary sources?
What other source materials might be helpful to provide more historical context for this eyewitness testimony? What aspects of the history might these other source materials help reveal?
What was the context of the Holocaust and World War II at the time of the events Anita describes?
Explore the Museum's website and Collections to learn more about children's experiences of hiding during the Holocaust.
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