During the Holocaust many Jews lived under assumed identities, which required them to change their names, to adopt customs foreign to them, to change their language, and to invent new life stories. Jews who did this were forced to learn new life styles and to carry out every little detail in daily life. Little gestures such as: bowing, greetings, Christian prayers and innumerable nuances which were not part of their own experiences before the Holocaust, were adopted in order to survive.
This Sisyphean task was to assist the Jews, so that in the event that they were caught by the German or local police, they could tell their invented stories freely, fluently and naturally.
The first stage in compiling a false identity was the preparation of identity cards which would support their stories. But the prepared documents and the endless practicing did not spare the Jews from the fear which gripped them when a German policeman would stop them for a random or planned check, either short or long, and he would begin to interrogate them as to their lives in general, and their activities at the moment when they were caught. Indeed, life under a false identity was fraught with indescribable mental stress, when the danger of death was ever-present and their lives hung by a thread.
