Tell No One Who You Are (19 page)

When she visited the Saktregers to say good-bye to them as well, she learned that Léon hoped to go to England to study and maybe stay there. Régine hoped so; it would be nice to have someone from her childhood there.

Régine felt much anxiety about going to live in England. When she last saw Oncle Shlomo, she had only been four years old. Whatever she knew about him she had learned from the many stories her mother used to tell. Fela had been reassuring. Régine would be in her own family, she reminded her, and they would send her to school. She could speak Yiddish with them until she mastered English. Yiddish was the language Régine had spoken with her mother, and by now she had almost forgotten it.

Régine looked out of the window of the airplane. Clouds blocked her vision of what lay below. She settled back in her seat, but her back felt rigid, and she was still unable to relax. She flipped the page of her autograph book and read the second inscription.

April 12, 1946

To our daughter Régine
,

You are leaving us, dear Régine, taking with you the undying affection of your adoptive parents and leaving behind you enormous regrets. May our best wishes accompany you over there. Be happy and keep with you an everlasting souvenir of us. Do not forget us. We will always remember our dear daughter Régine brightening our home with her beautiful youth
.

With the fervent hope that each year will bring you back to us, dear Régine, this comes with our most tender kisses
.

Pierre & Sylvie
.

Régine noticed something now that she had not seen before, something surprising. It was not so much that Pierre and Sylvie called her their daughter and thought of themselves as her adoptive parents. What surprised her was that they had written “Régine” in her book. This was new, and at first it came as a shock. To Pierre and Sylvie, she had always been Augusta Dubois, right up to their last good-bye. But now, she saw, they accepted that Augusta was gone from their lives and had been replaced by Régine.

The propeller plane hit an air pocket and made a sudden drop. Régine caught her breath, frightened, until the plane evened itself. She looked out the window again. The clouds had opened and she could see the dark water below. They were crossing over the English Channel. She smiled, realizing what day it was: April 15, 1946, the eve of Passover.

I
N ENGLAND
, Régine lived with her uncle, learned English, finished secondary school, took a secretarial course and went to work.

At the age of eighteen, she married Peretz Zylberberg, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. “I wanted to start a family of my own as soon as possible,” she says. A son, Philip, was born in 1952 and a daughter, Sonia, in 1954.

Léon Saktreger who had also immigrated to England remained a close friend. “I saw him and his wife often. He became my surrogate brother.” Régine also kept in touch with her friends in Belgium, returning there every holiday. She brought her son Philip to visit the Wathieus and Fela Herman and then, before immigrating to Canada in 1958, she brought both her son and daughter to say good-bye to them.

Through the years, Régine continued to hang onto hope that somehow somewhere her father or brother had survived — even after the Memorial National des Martyrs Juifs erected in Brussels in 1970 listed their names among the 23,880 Jews from Belgium who did not return from the death camps. In 1972 she went to Israel, a present she made herself for her fortieth birthday. She did not believe in God, but she wrote a note and inserted it into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for a miracle. In 1979 another monument was added to the National Memorial in Brussels, this one listed her father
among the 242 Jewish heroes who had taken part in acts of resistance to the Nazi occupation and died.

It was not until 1982 that she was forced to abandon all hope. That year German SS files were published with the names of Jews from Belgium who had passed through the Malines deportation center near Brussels, the number of the convoy that took them to Auschwitz and the number assigned each victim. There she found the names and numbers of her father, her brother, her Aunt Ida and Uncle Zigmund — and her mother.

Seeing her mother’s name with a number beside it brought a new shock of horror. Because her mother had been so ill, Régine had thought death might have come mercifully to her as soon as she was arrested — before being thrown onto trucks and trains, before her arrival at Auschwitz, before being put into the selection line that sent those unable to work directly to the gas chambers. “I cried more for my mother,” she says, “than for any of the others.”

Another pain of not-knowing that Régine had carried with her through the years was relieved two years later.

It concerned Madame Sadowski’s account of her parents’ arrest. Régine had refused to believe that her father could have allowed her mother to be arrested while he hid in the coal closet. But what exactly had occurred when the Gestapo came to 73 rue Van Lint?

In 1984, on a visit back from Canada to England, she was spending an evening with Léon Saktreger and his wife. He was nearly sixty years old at that time. After dinner, Léon handed her a dozen typewritten sheets, explaining: “I felt I should write down what happened to my family and our friends during the war, just so my children and grandchildren might know. I mention your parents in it, so I thought you might like a copy.”

Régine tore the papers from his hand and rushed through them to find the part about her parents. She read it, then looked at Léon with astonishment. “Why did you never tell me all this?” she asked. “All these years, you knew this and you never told me?”

“I thought you knew,” he answered, flustered. “If you had asked …”

“Tell me now, everything.”

Léon started slowly. “After your brother was sent to France, my parents were afraid I’d be picked up next. They made plans for where I would hide. Then came the raids at Antwerp in the middle of August where whole families were taken, and my parents arranged hiding places for themselves as well. Solidarité was telling everyone to try to escape or hide. Your father was telling everyone. But he could not hide himself.”

Léon seemed uncertain how to continue. “You did know that your mother had cancer, had been operated on and was sent home from the hospital to die?”

“Yes.”

“There was no way she could run and hide and your father was not going to leave her. Your mother was sure she would not be arrested. Why would the Gestapo want a dying woman? She even had a certificate from the surgeon at the hospital stating that under no circumstances should she be moved and she was sure that would save her. It was your father who was in danger.

“My mother was there nearly every day and they told her their plan. If the Gestapo came, your father would hide in the coal closet in the hall and your mother would lock him in with a heavy padlock on the outside of the door. Your mother felt she could walk the short distance to lock him in and let him out afterwards. The Gestapo would not bother to break it
open and look inside. Why would anyone be in a closet with a lock outside?

“It was an ingenious scheme,” Léon paused. “But your parents underestimated the Gestapo. They took your dying mother from her bed. The next day they came back. We think the new tenant upstairs informed the Gestapo. They found your father, banging on the closet door, trying to get out.”

Léon spoke slowly as he completed the account. “At what point your father realized your mother was not coming to let him out, whether he thought she had become too terrorized from the raid to move, whether he knew she had been arrested, we’ll never know.”

That was all Régine was able to learn about the disappearance of her family in the Holocaust.

In 1991, she attended the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II. More than 1,600 from twenty-eight countries came to New York City for the meetings.

Afterwards, Régine commented: “Many were babies and too young to remember their parents when they were in hiding. I felt sorry for them. I had my memories.”

Belgium and the Jews

Belgium is justly proud of its record in trying to protect Jews from deportation to the Nazi concentration camps during the occupation of that country by the Germans.

Of the more than 60,000 Jews living there at the outbreak of World War II, more than half survived because of the assistance given by the Belgian people and their institutions in assisting escapes or, more often, in providing hiding places.

Jewish children hid in Belgium

More than 4,000 Jewish children were hidden in institutions and private homes. The sixty-five schools, convents, orphanages, creches, camps and hospitals that provided this shelter knew the origin of the children they were taking in and the danger of being found out by the Gestapo. Hundreds of private families also gave shelter to one or two Jewish children, some knowingly, most unknowingly. Jewish children were mixed in with non-Jewish children by Belgian organizations providing “country stays” for city children.

Solidarité Juive

Solidarité was one of several communist organizations in Belgium at the time of the outbreak of World War II. The Communist Party was outlawed and non-citizens were forbidden to participate in political activity of any nature but many Jews from eastern Europe were communists and believed that communism would end the racial and religious prejudice that seemed endemic in that part of the world. Because organizations like Solidarité and Secours Mutuel, a leftist Zionist organisation, operated on a personal level in small groups in private homes, publishing and distributing underground newspapers, they were immediately effective in proposing opposition to the Nazis, advising Jews not to register, not to answer call-ups, warning them of impending raids, and recommending they go into hiding.

As the arrests and deportation of Jews mounted, the Comité de Défense des Juifs was formed in 1943, uniting a wide spectrum of Jewish political and cultural groups. They were assisted by an equally wide range of non-Jewish Belgian organisations, leftist, humanitarian and Christian.

Fela Mucha-Herman, alias Nicole alias Marie-Solidarité

Fela Mucha was a
convoyeuse
, one who picked up the Jewish children from their parents, took them to hiding places, checked that they were properly looked after, and following the war, returned them to parents or other relatives who survived or found sanctuaries for them. As soon as the first arrests of Jews took place, all her waking hours were devoted
to saving children. Still a believing communist at war’s end, she and her second husband, Edgar Herman, and their son and daughter moved to Poland to help build the great new socialist state. “By our second day there, I was completely disillusioned,” she remarked shortly before her 80th birthday in 1994. “Anti-semitism, corruption, greed, bribery, favoritism were even more rampant than when I left Poland in 1938.” It was six years before she and her family could return to Belgium. “Still, I’m glad I was a communist back then early in the war. It permitted me to do the most important work of my life.” Several hundred Jewish children owe their survival to her help.

The names and birthdates of the members of Régine Miller’s family, the German convoy that took them from Belgium to Poland, and the number ascribed to each are all taken from German lists published in 1982. All Jews arrested in Belgium passed through the SS army depot at Malines (Mechelen) near Brussels where they were given numbers before being transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

From the number of the transport, we know that Régine’s mother was the first in the family to be picked up by the Gestapo. She was on convoy No.11 that left Belgium with 1,742 Jews, including 523 children, on September 26, 1942 and arrived at Auschwitz on September 28. Of these 344 were assigned to work duty and only 30 survived the war. All the others died in the gas chambers.

Her father was on the next convoy (No.12) that left Belgium October 10 along with convoy No.13 carrying 1,679 Jews, of which 487 were children. Only 54 survived.

Her brother Léon, who had been conscripted by the Germans in July and sent as forced labor to build fortifications on the northern coast of France, was returned along with the other young Jewish conscripts to Malines where they were registered and put on convoys No.16 and No.17. They left with 1,937 prisoners, including 137 children, on October 31. At the Belgian-German frontier 241 managed to escape from the train. (Régine liked to believe that her brother had been among them; when he did not return, she thought he might
have been shot trying to escape.) Only 85 survived from these two convoys.

Régine’s aunt Ida and uncle Zigmund were both on the same convoy — No. 18 — that left Malines along with convoy No.19 on January 15, 1943 with 1,632 prisoners, of which 287 were children. Seventy-seven managed to escape at the border. Of the 1,555 who arrived at Auschwitz on January 18, 468 were assigned to work duty. The balance were sent to the gas chambers.

In all 26 convoys left Malines between August 4, 1942 and July 31, 1944, carrying 25,257 Jews from Belgium to the death camp of Auschwitz. An additional two convoys took 218 to other German concentration camps, 132 of them to Buchenwald.

On the eve of the Nazi invasion, the Jewish population of Belgium was 66,000 (out of a total population of 8.3 million). Only ten percent of Jews however were Belgian citizens. Most of the others had come from Eastern Europe (mainly Poland) and Germany, escaping the Nazi threat. Thirty-three thousand Jews lived in Brussels, primarily in the district of Anderlecht, near the train station.

There were very close ties between Jewish groups and Belgian leftist movements, and this would prove to be very important in rescue efforts and the (relative) success of the Resistance efforts during the war. A total of 70,000 people were in the Resistance in Belgium. The Comité de Défense des Juifs helped find hiding places for Jews. Their children’s branch, Oeuvre Nationale de l’Enfance, hid 4,000 children.