Onbekende Kinderen

The people in this film belonged to the group of 51 ‘unknown children’ who in 1944 ended up in Westerbork camp without any parents or relatives. They were housed as a group in the abandoned children ward of the camp and later dispatched to Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. They were too young to remember much of their lives in the Netherlands. Some of them did not even know their name or had unknowingly been given the name of the family that had hid them during the war. They survived the war, but back in Holland a new struggle began. Not all children were able to retrace their relatives after the war; some were adopted or ended up in children’s homes. They see their early years as a gap in their history; the basis of their existence is missing. In this film, they explain how they are trying to recover the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their lives.