These are the words of Louise Lawrence-Israëls.
She is a Dutch-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust,
and she visited Xaverian’s eighth graders via Zoom
this May with her moving story of perseverance
through hate. Lawrence-Israëls was born in German-
occupied Holland, and at only six months old was
moved to a small attic in Amsterdam to escape rising
antisemitic profiling and Nazi persecution. For two
and a half years, she lived in hiding with her mother,
father, brother, and family friend, Selma, whose
own family had already been tragically deported
from the Netherlands by Nazi leaders. During this
time, Lawrence-Israëls was denied even her own
identity in exchange for the family’s safety—because
of necessary false identification, Louise explained, “I
thought my name was Maria.”
“Our life was very quiet,” Lawrence-Israëls
remarked to our Francis Xavier Division students,
who have been studying Holocaust accounts as part
of the eighth grade theology curriculum. “There
was nothing coming in from outside—it was just
us. My parents never told us about the outside
world, and they never told us about their worries.”
Despite the horrors of these two and a half years—
years marked by hidden anxieties, sickness, and
hunger—Lawrence-Israëls maintains that she
was “a happy little girl,” oblivious to her family’s
precarity, thanks to the strength of her parents: “I
STOPPING HATE
LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
was a normal child who happened to be in hiding for
two years.”
When their hiding ended in 1945 with the
Canadian liberation of Amsterdam, Louise and her
brother were initially wary of the new world they
found outside the attic. “The sun blinded us—we
didn’t know about that, and it was scary,” she
explained. “We thought if you walked off the end of
the street, you would fall right off.” But, as she said,
children are resilient. After years of scarcity, their
first taste of dessert post-liberation changed their
minds: “Being free meant eating cookies.”
Lawrence-Israëls is a speaker from the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The
Museum’s Office of Survivor Affairs offers schools,
civic groups, military bases, and other institutions
nationwide the opportunity to hear a Holocaust
survivor share his or her experiences. A major
theme of her presentation doubles as the USHMM’s
founding principle: “Never again.” Lawrence-Israëls
and other USHMM speakers educate young people
about the Holocaust in order to prevent recurring
instances of genocide across the globe. Xaverian
students later examined this idea, comparing
Lawrence-Israëls’s story to their studies of Elie
Wiesel’s Night before continuing the day with
other activities meant to memorialize the tragedy
of the Holocaust and discuss its lasting effects. As
Krish Dhingra ’25 eloquently commented after the
presentation in his small group discussion, “Hate
comes out of hate. The best thing we can do is stop
hating in our own lives.”
Written by Nicholas Daoust ’21, Communications Corps
Pictured here is Krish Dhingra ’25. After studying Elie
Wiesel’s Night, students created identity boxes to reflect
on how experiences shape our identity. The boxes are
stored in a custom wooden box that was created in
the X-Ploration Center, in order to demonstrate that
the students are each part of one larger Class of 2025
community.
Louise Lawrence-Israëls in hiding as a young girl
during the Holocaust
8 www.xbhs.com