Issue link: http://tcnj.uberflip.com/i/1417553
34 The College of New Jersey Magazine My cousin Motl rushed into the apartment and told my mother he had found a place to hide me. She shrieked with horror — or was it despair — no doubt because the worst was about to happen: The only son she had left was about to be taken away. Her husband, my father, had died from cancer a few months before and her older son, Max, had already run away to Switzerland, and we had no idea if he had been successful in his escape. Motl instructed us that we had to leave right away, "before curfew and the German patrols," for the priest who would be hiding me didn't want anyone to notice that a child was being brought to church so late in the evening. At the rectory door, Motl kissed my cheek goodbye and told me to listen to the father. I was totally paralyzed. I felt so drained and abandoned that I couldn't decide whether to cry or scream, so I listened to Father Jan Bruylandts who had taken my hand as soon as I was inside the door. He pushed on a wall that turned out to be a door to a hidden basement. Even at the age of nearly seven I felt empty and cold with fear. I think I trembled without stopping until I finally fell asleep. Sometime later, a warm wet feeling on my stom- ach and on the top on my leg woke me. It took me a while to realize that I had wet the bed. I don't think I had ever done that before. The other children seemed to be staring at me. This basement dungeon Avrumele "Albert" Hepner's first memory of World War II was in 1940 when he was just 5 years old. Sirens wailed outside his home in Brussels, Belgium, as his father quickly turned off lights and ran to close the curtains. "It begins," his father says. "I think the Germans are now attacking Brussels." Within the year, Albert would become one of the thousands of hidden children of the Holocaust — children who, in order to stay safe from the Nazis, were pulled from their families, shuffled from place to place, and concealed from the outside world. What follow are excerpts from his memoir, Avrumele: Recollections of a Hidden Child, where he recounts his childhood years living in the shadows.