So much has been written about the Jewish children that were saved from the Holocaust by being taken into convents. And praise has been given to religious institutions for the courage shown in the face of the risks which this help involved. But there has also been a great deal of controversy surrounding the question of the lost Jews, that is, those children and young people whose parents entrusted their care to clerics. Then, when they became orphans, they were baptised and raised as Christians. This is an extremely delicate topic about which generalisations should not be made: each story was unique in some way, as were the developments which followed.
A good description of this chapter of history was given in recent days in Israel: the Hebrew speaking Catholic Vicariate commemorated the figure of Sister Hanna Kleinberger - an 88 year old nun who died in Jerusalem at the beginning of August – on its website.
Born in Antwerp in 1924, Hanna was the daughter of a Polish Jewish couple who had immigrated to Belgium; during the war, Hanna’s parents sent her and her brother and sister, both younger than her, into hiding in some Catholic religious institutions.
Assuming a false identity, then adolescent Hanna attended a school for nurses run by nuns.
The three children survived the war but their parents did not; then Hanna’s life took a different path: she was baptised and about a year later she chose to enter religious life and joined the Sisters of Charity of Namur. She left for Zaire as a nun and nurse, where she carried out her ministry as a missionary for thirteen years.
But the question of her Jewish roots, which she had never renounced, remained. Until she asked her order to complete the aliyah, the “return to Jerusalem”, a right held by all Jews in the State of Israel. So as of 1970, Sister Hanna lived in the Holy City, becoming a living testimony of the possible meeting between Jews and Christians. In Israel her professional skills were put to good use: for many years she trained the new generations of nurses at Hadassah hospital, the most important hospital in Jerusalem.
But this is not all. Once she reached retirement age, she was able to return to Kinshasa for a month or so thanks to an Israeli humanitarian mission which was to open a new hospital in the country. This did not for one moment bring her vocation as a Catholic nun into question.
In Jerusalem, Sister Hanna worked with Yad Vashem, contributing, through her testimony, to the recognition of the Righteous Among the Nations title given to five Belgian Catholic monks.