It’s been almost 70 years since Charles Stevens first went to live at an orphanage, but he still remembers how confused he felt.
At just 5 years old, with his 3-year-old sister, Lili, in tow, Stevens was sent to a Protestant orphanage not far from Brussels as his parents sorted out an escape route from Belgium. It was 1942, and the couple had made the difficult decision to put their children somewhere where they could pass for non-Jews.
“I had no understanding of why I was put there,” recalls Stevens, 74, a retired nuclear engineer and Palo Alto resident. “How I interpreted it in my own head was: I was being punished. Why was I being punished? The only thing I could think of was that I didn’t finish my meals. I remember thinking, ‘Take me home, I’ll finish my soup, I promise.’ ”
The siblings would see two other temporary homes — a convent and an orphanage mainly for children who had lost their families in concentration camps — before reuniting four years later with their parents, who had made it to New York after escaping to Italy.
Stevens and his tale make for one of the early success stories of the “Remember Me?” project — which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched in late March in anticipation of Holocaust Remembrance Week, which begins Sunday, May 1, on Yom HaShoah.
On the project’s website (remember-me.ushmm.org), photos of 1,100 unidentified children were posted, many of them taken by aid workers shortly after World War II. Friends and family members are encouraged to help identify the young survivors.
A photo of a young Stevens was one of the original unidentified photos, but he and a handful of others have since been recognized, and their names and stories added to the website. In Stevens’ case, someone already identified through “Remember Me?” recognized his photo and notified the museum, which in turn contacted Stevens (who was already in the database). Stevens then sent in a current photo and an updated biography.
That bio includes a reference to the first orphanage he and his sister spent time in: It was located in Uccle, Belgium, and within a year, all of the Jewish children there were made to leave. Rather than being cast out, however, he and his sister were relocated to a convent in Bruges with the help of Bruno Reynders, a Benedictine monk who is recognized for having rescued at least 300 Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Stevens’ memories of the convent are vivid. “We didn’t have enough clothes to stay warm. We got frostbite,” he recalls. “It wasn’t unusual to pick up a piece of food and see that it had worms in it.”
He didn’t even know he was Jewish, or in hiding; before they parted, his mother had told him that he wasn’t a Jew, and that he was never to suggest he was.
“I didn’t have any idea I was being hunted by the Germans. I didn’t feel different from anyone,” he remembers. “When you’re 5 years old, if you’re parents tell you you are or you aren’t something, you believe them.”
Meanwhile, Stevens’ parents made their way to Italy; when Americans liberated Rome in 1944, they were shipped to a refugee camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego, N.Y. But Stevens and his sister had been moved to an orphanage, and they had to wait over a year before they could join them.
In September 1946, the month of Stevens’ 10th birthday, the family was reunited in New York. Neither children nor parents recognized each other.
“They had been through a lot, the war had aged them,” Stevens says.
The family moved to the Lower East Side, where both kids attended New York City public schools while their parents toiled in the garment industry, and then to the Bronx. When Stevens graduated from high school, he attended NYU.
Now living in Palo Alto with his wife Barbara, within miles of his two grown daughters and four grandchildren, the family belongs to Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos. He volunteers with the Northern California Holocaust Center, and he gives talks to local high schools.
Stevens has considered himself an American since age 10 — his post-graduate education and career as a nuclear engineer
took him to Michigan, Pittsburgh and San Diego before he settled in the Bay Area, while his sister still lives in New York. But he says it took him a lot longer to start talking about what he experienced during the war.
“Up until about 1990, if someone asked me where I was from, I would never say Belgium. I’d say New York,” Stevens says. “I was afraid they’d want to know more about it, and if I did start to talk about it I’d choke up.”
He says two events helped him start to open up about his past. In 1984, Ruth Gruber’s book “Haven,” about the refugee camp at Oswego, made mention of his parents and how they felt about leaving their children behind. And in 1991, the first Hidden Child Conference in New York saw thousands of people like Stevens converging to tell their stories.
It was at that conference that Stevens — who was born Camille Silberman in Brussels — learned more about Reynders, the righteous Benedictine monk, and gained pride in his name of Stevens.
“He gave me that name,” Stevens says of the monk. “I kept it because of him. So that was another very emotional thing for me. And after that, I began to feel more open about it. I started to talk about it when people asked. It started to get easier. It’s an ongoing thing.”
He pauses. “Just now, for instance, I said a lot more than I thought I would.”