The ‘Secret Lives’ of Shoah’s Hidden

In 1993, filmmaker Aviva Slesin traveled to Lithuania to meet Matilda Salenekas, the non-Jew who hid her from the Nazis when she was a small child. She had no memories of Salenekas, whom she had not seen since 1945, and the two women did not speak the same language.

"But the feeling between us was so powerful," Slesin said by phone from her Manhattan home. "We both wept, and I understood that in some strong way we were connected. I began wondering whether the experience was similar for other hidden children, and if they had memories of their rescuers, what the relationship was about."

Slesin’s curiosity led her to produce and direct a documentary, "Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During World War II," which joins a particularly heartwrenching subgenre of Holocaust cinema: documentaries about child survivors by filmmakers with a family connection to the subject. Examples include Pierre Sauvage’s "Weapons of the Spirit" (1987) and Deborah Oppenheimer’s Oscar-winning "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (2000). The films are especially poignant because only 10 percent of Jewish children survived the war.

Slesin’s affecting but unsentimental documentary focuses on the psychological aftermath of hiding, such as the sense of abandonment child survivors carried into adulthood and the difficulty rebonding with parents.

Alice Sondike, who was sheltered on a farm in Poland, describes the revulsion she felt when her mother, Julia Melcer, returned from Auschwitz.

"I was covered with lice, and she was trying to clean me up," Sondike says on camera. "What she looked like when she came back…. I didn’t believe she was my mother."

Melcer, sitting next to Sondike, nods and adds that her daughter said, "Don’t touch me with your Jewish hands."

Other relationships also proved strained.

"Hidden children are generally very adaptable, but for some of us, the bonding mechanisms are altered or broken," Slesin said. "I think that children have only so many bondings in them. At some point, they don’t ‘take’ anymore."

The filmmaker speaks from personal experience. Born Aviva Leibowitch in 1943, she was smuggled out of a Jewish ghetto in a suitcase before being placed with Salenekas and her husband, Juozas, when she was 9 months old. Slesin, who has never married or had children, vaguely remembers that when her mother returned from Stutthof concentration camp two years later, "she was a stranger and I didn’t want to go with her."

Like most survivors who had hidden their children, Slesin’s mother had been greatly altered by the war.

"Many of the returning parents were themselves orphans and they were grieving," the director said. "They looked like hell because they had been to hell and back."

Over the next decade, Slesin lived a nomad’s existence, relocating to Munich, New York and Montreal as her mother married, was widowed and remarried.

"It was not a happy time for me," she said of the years with her second stepfather. "That was one bonding too many I was asked to do, and it just didn’t work."

In 1965, Slesin moved to Manhattan, she said, "To start my grownup life in a place with no history or baggage from my family." Because of her refugee experience, she was "never a joiner," but she was a good observer — which in part led her to become a filmmaker.

Over the next 30 years, Slesin made movies that were anything but personal, winning the Oscar for her 1987 documentary, "The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table."

The change came after she attended a convention of hidden children in 1991; two years later, she set off for Salenekas’ Kovno, Lithuania, home with a translator.

"I wanted to see if I could get some memories or any kind of clues into my character," she said. I also wanted to find out why she risked her life to save me, but she just sighed a lot when I asked her that. She wasn’t really able to answer."

Slesin hoped to learn more by quizzing survivors who, like herself, had been hidden by rescuers without apparent ulterior motives.

"Her questions were penetrating," the film’s co-producer and writer, Toby Appleton Perl, recalled. "Aviva was very much driven by her need to understand certain things about her experience."

During interviews, conducted in Israel and Europe, Slesin said, she was deeply touched by a Dutch woman who also had been hidden as a small child. Erica Polak recounted the "difficult relationship" she had with her mother and the great joy she had experienced upon reuniting with her rescuer.

"She moved me enormously because she had no memory either of this woman, yet her feelings about her were so strong," the director said. Interviews like Polak’s were revealing for Slesin.

"What I have come to understand is that our rescuers were also our parents," she said. "When you are a child, the people who feed you, protect you and care for you in essence are your parents. That explains why the bonds are so emotional and lasting, even after more than 50 years."

"Secret Lives" opens June 20 at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.