A Holocaust survivor hierarchy? How absurd

After all that I have read, researched and written about the Holocaust over the past four decades, I considered myself fairly au fait with the subject. I have known a number of survivors, as well as rescuers - starting with my own mother, the Hungarian singer Vali Racz, a Righteous Among the Nations. But I guess there is always something new to learn, and recently I was able to add to my general knowledge of the Holocaust a little-known - and somewhat disturbing - aspect of it.

I was attending a function at the offices of the Board of Deputies, and got into a long conversation with two men who belong to the Child Survivors' Association of Great Britain - part of the broader World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. The British group is about 100-strong and based throughout the UK. Its members are people who, as young children, experienced Nazi persecution. Some came here on Kindertransports, but most arrived after surviving in ghettos, in hiding or in concentration camps.

One of the men I talked to was originally from Holland and had been hidden by a gentile family in Amsterdam. Even as a small boy, he understood the peril he was in and lived every day with the fear of being discovered, or betrayed.

The other man was an inmate in Belsen between the ages of four and five. Although he, too, was Dutch and had been living in Holland, his mother was British-born and had family in the UK. As a result, he and his mother were imprisoned in a special section of the camp reserved for inmates with Allied connections, who might be useful for prisoner exchanges, so they were treated a little better. He and his mother survived. His father, with no Allied connections, perished.