A Child's Fear: Arielle Weininger and Olga Weiss

March 11, 2016

In 1941, when she was 5 years old, Olga Weiss fled Belgium with her family to escape the Nazis. She remembers the fear she experienced during the war, recalling a vivid experience in which a guide hired to smuggle her family to Switzerland instead denounced them to the Gestapo. These experiences are recounted in this conversation with Arielle Weininger, a curator at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Life and Learning.

This story was produced by StoryCorps.

This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded and produced by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

Olga Weiss: We tried to flee Belgium because the Northern part of France was still free at that time. We piled in different cars and we went to France and it was kind of a mistake because as we were traveling towards the South of France, the French army, which had been defeated, was retreating and coming back to where we were and telling us to go back where we came from because the Germans were already following them. So this is what we did and it was not an easy trip because German airplanes were flying over us and shooting down. And so we had to get out of our cars and hide in ditches along the road, trying to escape being shot at. But eventually we came back to Belgium. And so we returned to our house where we had been before and try to continue on with our life.

Arielle Weininger,: Did you understand why or what was happening or did your parents talk with you about it?

Olga Weiss: Everything was in terms of fear. This is a frightening situation and something terrible will happen to us if we don't follow the orders, if you don't comply to the new rules. So as a child, I think that's a very powerful feeling to be afraid. I was in school for a short while, in kindergarten, and they took Jewish children and they separated them within a classroom. They said, Jewish children sit over here and all non-Jewish children sit over there. So they sort of ostracized us. And later on, they put us in a separate classroom. After being in a separate classroom, they told us that we could no longer come to school. I heard my parents talk about our friends being arrested, being sent to prison. I could see even in the streets, some Jews being dragged into cars, in other words, just kidnapped almost or beaten up.

This one on all of 1941 and there were more and more restrictions to Jews. They couldn't sit on certain benches in the park. They couldn't ride the street cars. They couldn't go to a theater,. There were curfews. Beginning of 1942, we had to wear a star that became more problematic because you sort of walk down the street announcing to the world that you're Jewish because you have a star. A spring of 1942, many, many raids occurred, it became more and more dangerous and we couldn't stay any longer and we tried to escape. We were going to be smuggled into Switzerland because we had no legal papers. We had to get a guide, to whom we paid a lot of money, and I remember sitting in the bedroom on the suitcase with my coat on waiting for him to come and he didn't come.

So we left the house and we went to hide across a courtyard in the garage. But while we were waiting, we saw that the Gestapo came to our house. We found out later that the guide had denounced us. And that's when we went into hiding in a small town, it's called Rhode-Saint-Genese, And so that's where we spent the next two years.

Arielle Weininger,: There was a moment where the American soldiers showed up.

Olga Weiss: Right, I think it was May 9th, 1944. And it was probably the best day of my life for a very, very long time. And yes, so we were liberated. My father could go out for the first time and we went back to the same neighborhood where we had lived before the war and during the war. So we came here in 1950 when I was 14. And all of a sudden I saw myself surrounded by Jewish children. Like a third of the class was Jewish and it felt wonderful. For the first time it felt good to be Jewish.