I seem to recall a story about the rosh yeshiva of Ponevezh (R’ Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman) who went looking for these children after the war. When Catholic monasteries and abbies tried to refuse him entry, so the story goes, he would ask, I just want to say one sentence to whatever crowd of children you have here. And the authorities in each place would look at this tiny, shuffling, bearded rav and let him in.
So the rosh yeshiva would go to the classroom or the cafeteria or whatever, wherever the children were, and he would put his hand over his eyes and say the six words of the Shema. “SHEMA,” He would start, slowly enough, “ADO-NAI ELO-HEINU,” and he would hear little voices joining in, “ADO-NAI ECHAD!”
And sure enough, when he quickly uncovered his eyes he would see little kids blinking up at him, wondering where he came from. The Shema is the first prayer a Jewish child learns, and it is the last prayer one says before death. Time among Christians would not have taken it from all the Jewish children.
At every place, the story goes, Rav Kahaneman walked away with Jewish orphans, children that the Catholic authorities had denied were Jews.
And everyone forgets that Rafael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide did not require death of the individual; it allowed for the death of the culture.
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