An in-depth look at the Holocaust’s smallest and most innocent victims, Hidden Children shares interviews with child survivors who were hidden with Gentile families during the war, revealing the lasting psychological damage of a childhood spent in terror.

“I’ve always tried to resemble other people,” one woman says, recognizing the giant emotional gap that separates her from everyone who enjoyed a normal childhood. “I couldn’t be a child, and I can’t say that I’ve ever been an adult,” she admits, revealing how crucial those years of naive innocence are to one’s development.

They grew up facing painful isolation, repressed sadness, and identity confusion, but because they didn’t have numbers on their arms the Jewish community has never fully acknowledged their suffering. It’s not until fifty years after the war that these hidden children can revisit their painful pasts and admit that, inside, they are still terrified little girls and boys, begging to be loved and struggling to understand their strange childhood experiences.

Though they were trapped in small bodies and had the limited understanding of the world befitting their young years, hidden children were not allowed a childhood. They couldn’t play, they couldn’t cry when they missed their parents — they could never relax for fear of getting caught. Most of all, they couldn’t acknowledge the feelings that boiled inside of them because it would have been too overwhelming. Faced with the enormous responsibility of survival, they were forced to take on an adult seriousness and ignore their own emotional needs.

The world can be confusing when you’re a child, but for a child forced to live a lie, the world becomes all the more complicated. “I’m Jewish. I’m glad I’m Jewish. But I mustn’t say so,” one woman, in hiding as a young girl, would recite to herself as a mantra, as she lived with the constant stress of her double identity. One man has similar memories: as a boy in hiding with a non-Jewish family, he decided to integrate himself entirely into his new life and suppress every earlier memory of his life as a Jew.

But many of these children didn’t entirely understand what it even meant to be Jewish. One woman recalls overhearing someone say that Jews have webbed feet. She looked down at her own non-webbed feet and thought to herself, “S***! I’m not even Jewish! What am I after all?!”

The children’s limited frame of reference made it hard for them to realize that what they were experiencing wasn’t necessarily normal. For one little girl, being treated with indifference was normal. For another, being regularly beaten with a belt by the gentile man that took her in during the Holocaust became normal. Growing up under these conditions, with little exposure to the outside world, they didn’t even realize that a better kind of life was possible.

For most all of them, the war’s end didn’t relieve any suffering. Liberation came too late—they had already been robbed of their childhoods. And, in the face of everything else, many of them had to accept that their parents were dead and weren’t going to return. “I felt like an old suitcase at a railroad,” one man says, “waiting for some passenger to come pick me up.”

Fifty years after the Holocaust’s end, one now-grown little boy is still searching for his mother. “I bought a magnifying glass,” he says, explaining that to this day he can’t help searching every Holocaust picture he finds, “just in case I might recognize my mother’s body.” He knows it’s ridiculous, but he can’t help himself.

Ultimately, Hidden Children realizes that no matter how old we get, we never escape from the little child we once were. That tiny little girl or boy still hides deep inside each of us, in the place that’s most vulnerable, and can always make us cry fresh tears over what hurt many years go.