Georgia Voices - Hidden Children and Escaped Families

The following interviews represent stories of children and families who survived the war because they bravely fled their homes in search of safe hiding places -- from finding protection from the kindness of strangers to relying on the relative safety of attics and caves.

Manuela Mendels Bornstein
  • Manuela Mendels Bornstein

    Manuela Mendels was just a child when her family fled Paris after the Nazi invasion and, with the help of many in the Resistance, survived the war with her family in a small French town.

  • Warren and Cheryl Alifeld

    It wasn't until he was a teen registering for the U.S. military that Warren Alifeld discovered that he was actually born in Germany and given up for adoption to American parents as a baby by his mother in order to save his life.

  • Lucy Carson

    Lucy (along with her cousins Regine and Suzan) survived the war as a hidden child with the help of the French Jewish humanitarian organization, Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants (OSE).

  • Bebe Forehand

    Bebe's father was a member of the Resistance, and the family hid in an attic in Belgium to escape the hands of the Nazis.

  • Hershel Greenblat

    Born in the Ukraine, Hershel spent the first two years of his life hiding in a cave while his parents were fighters in the Resistance against the Nazis and later the Russians.

  • Kalman Held

    Following his father's arrest and deportation to Siberia after the Soviet invasion of Romania in 1940, young Kalman and his mother made their way to Palestine, where he lived on a series of kibbutzes before eventually coming to America.

  • Steven Low

    Born in Berlin, Germany, at two in 1940 Steven and his parents escaped Nazi Germany and fled to Shanghai, China where they lived for seven years in the Shanghai ghetto and endured the brutality of the Japanese occupation.

  • George Rishfeld

    When Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, three-year old Jurek (later George) was send to live with a Catholic family. This brave family sheltered him in a Warsaw apartment for three years, evading authorities.  At war's end, George was reunited with his parents. 

  • Regine Dollman Rosenfelder

    Born in Belgium, Regine and her extended family fled to France after the 1940 Nazi invasion of Antwerp. They were protected by citizens of a small village. Later the children were moved to several children's home withthe assistance of OSE, a French Jewish humanitarian organization. 

  • Mary Bos Schneider

    Born in Amsterdam, Mary Bos attended school with Anne Frank, the renowned teenage diarist. Mary's Jewish father, Arie Bos, was the European Billiard Champion. In 1940, when the American Consulate advised the family to leave the country, they immigrated to America.

  • Barry Seidel

    After the Nazi invasion of Belgium, the Seidel family fled to the south of France, but there Barry's father was eventually arrested and deported.  Barry's older brother was sent to Switzerland, while Barry's mother was able to find safety for her son hidden in a Catholic school by nuns. 

  • Suzan Tibor

    After their family escaped the Nazis in Belgium for what they believed to be safer territory in southern France, Suzan and older sister Regine survived as hidden children with the assistance of the OSE organization.