Hide and Secret

The lovely Madelyn Simone came to visit at Pop-Pop’s House this week. Yes, I live there as well, but from day one of language development, it’s always been Pop-Pop’s House. At one point during her whirlwind visit, she asked me if I would a play a game with her. “What game,” I asked, hoping her answer wouldn’t be the dreaded word, “Monopoly.” “Hide and Secret,” replied Madelyn.

I quickly smothered my smile, but her name for the age-old world of hide and seek took me back in history more than seventy years, to a time and place where the life-and-death game of survival truly was, “Hide and Secret.” Perhaps best known in the hidden child literature is the story of Anne Frank, recorded in the posthumous publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, as her regular entries detailed her life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Concealed behind a bookcase in the Achterhuis, a secret annex, Anne chronicled life in a true “hide and secret” time for Jewish people across most of Europe.

With the innocence of a child caught up in the unknown, Anne reportedly left a few belongings with a friend before going into hiding, telling her, “I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?” Her marbles survived the Holocaust, but Anne didn’t, dying at age fifteen from typhus, just two short weeks before the prisoners were liberated from Bergen-Belson in April, 1945. However, through her diary, Anne’s words live on: “I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”

Another child caught up in the world of “hide and secret” was an eight-year-old Polish girl named Nelly Toll. She and her mother spent thirteen months hidden in the small bedroom of a Catholic family, forced to hide on the sill of a window that was bricked up from the outside when anyone came into the house. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, the life of Nelly and children like her “was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.”

Like Anne, Nelly also kept a diary, and her book, Behind the Secret Window, tells of her childhood experiences. She had been given a watercolor set by her mother, and during the days and weeks of fear-laced hiding, this young girl painted small pictures of what she imagined a normal life to be outside the walls of her captivity. “I draw my pictures, and make up little stories, which I enjoy a lot. Because when I paint I forget to be afraid . . .” In Nelly’s art, she found the strength to imagine a better word, a world that clung to hope in the midst of terror. These two young daughters of the Holocaust never met, but Anne spoke for both of them when she wrote, “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” Like Anne, Nelly’s diary has been preserved, as have the paintings she did in that hidden room so many years ago.  

The Massillon Museum, located less than an hour east of Ashland, is exhibiting Nelly’s artwork through May 18, and admission is free! Details of the exhibit and associated activities, including a presentation from the artist herself, can be found at www.massillonmuseum.org.

Anne Frank wrote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” At age eight, Nelly Toll captured that truth through her paintings. Our granddaughter can’t understand much of this at age four, but Madelyn and I will visit Nelly’s paintings at the Museum, planting a seed of connection to both Nelly and Anne, girls who experienced the reality of “Hide and Secret.” And one day, when it’s time, I will tell her the rest of their stories.