The Other Schindlers (24 page)

Another couple limped into a church and told the astonished priest that they were Jews who had escaped from the train to Auschwitz and they had no money. He gave them a 50-franc note, said ‘God bless you’, and told them how to get to Liège, where they had a relative to help them.

None of the escapees were betrayed by a Belgian –
L’honneur des Belges
.
98
Marion Schreiber attributes ‘national modesty’ as the reason no one knows how much the Belgians helped their Jewish neighbours. Additionally, she comments
that her book has had little media attention in France and the Netherlands, ‘countries which have trumpeted their resistance past while being rather less open about their collaborators’. She puts it down to jealousy.
99

Maistriau did not speak English and I asked a bilingual secretary to visit him on my behalf, which she did on 2 August 2004. He told her that although he claimed in the book that he was bored with his job, he had actually been ‘drilled’ against the Germans since he was 5 years old. His mother’s first husband had been a Jew and was in the French army. After he died in the First World War, she married a Belgian who was a doctor in the Belgian army.
100

There is a tendency in the UK to look at the Low Countries as one
homogeneous
area. This is particularly incorrect when it comes to Jewish rescue in the Holocaust:

In fact, more Jewish children were saved in Belgium than any other occupied country. Why? One answer is given by Steve Jelbert. He suggests that Belgians, unlike the Dutch, were bitterly anti-German having experienced ‘brutal German occupation in World War I’.
102
He also suggests that Belgians have a strong
individualistic
streak: ‘Given to unforced bourgeois individuality (it was, after all, the home of Surrealists such as Delvaux and Magritte), the strength of its civic society hampered the Nazis’ attempts to carry out their murderous policies.’
103
He
concludes
that ‘the Belgian bourgeoisie of the era apparently recognised themselves by lifestyle and culture, the idea of discrimination against minorities who clearly share the same values clearly contradicts the core beliefs of their civic society’.
104

When deportations first began in 1942, the patriotic underground newspaper
La Libre Belgique
urged its readers to show Jews support: ‘Greet them in passing! Offer them your seat on the tram! Protest against the barbaric measures that are being applied to them. That’ll make the “Boches” furious!’
105
The bureaucrats played their part too, in spite of the posters warning against helping the Jews, and some were discovered and punished:

It has been estimated that about 200,000 Belgians were in the Resistance, many motivated by strong anti-German feelings resulting from the First World War. Robert Maistriau was perfect Resistance material.
107
He was desperate to help damage the Germans because of their 1914 atrocities:

The hatred felt for Germans in Belgium was confirmed by Bob Whitby, the son of an English major and Belgian mother, who, aged 19, was interned in Belgium in 1940. He said: ‘We were very frightened because my mother had told us about the First World War, the cruelties and so on’.
109

Paul Spiegel wrote:

Another explanation of Belgium’s success is based on their willingness to disobey. ‘The Belgian police dragged their feet, railway workers left doors of the
deportation trains open or arranged ambushes, and many Jews found hiding places.’
111
Whereas in Holland, where 20–25,000 Jews went into hiding, half of them were discovered ‘no doubt through the efforts of professional and
occasional
informers’, it is significant that ‘of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners – a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality’.
112

In 1939 the population of Belgium was 8,386,600 and 1,537 have been
recognised
as Righteous Among the Nations (see Table 2 in Appendices). Perhaps the most remarkable rescue case I came across was of Gisele Reich, who in 1941 was at Malines awaiting deportation to Auschwitz with her parents. Her father was deported first and Gisele, aged 5, who suffered from a lung complaint, was waiting with her mother. A German officer took pity on Gisele and asked her mother if anyone would look after her. She must have mentioned their
neighbours
, the Van de Velde family, who were a devout Christian family. The Nazi telephoned them and they immediately agreed and came at once to collect her by car; they took her into their family even though their eighth child was
imminent
. The father was a chef in a hospital kitchen. Gisele lived with them until she was married. She had children and grandchildren of her own, but
unfortunately
had been severely traumatised by her experiences. Her son, Willi Buntinx, put the Van de Velde family’s actions down to genuine neighbourliness, and had never told anyone about the story until Rose Marie Guilfoyle told him I had asked her to see Robert Maistriau.
113

Maistriau was then very frail, with poor sight and mobility. He told Rose Marie about his childhood and his family’s anti-German attitudes. He also revealed that he now felt he has been given less credit than was his due as it was he alone who actually opened the doors to the train on 19 April 1943. He claims Youra Livchitz was frightened when he saw a German officer close to the train who might have recognised him and disappeared. Robert was also upset that Youra seemed to have been given the credit for leading the event – especially in the Washington Holocaust Museum.
114

Of the three, all were subsequently arrested for other matters. Livchitz was caught months later and was shot as a ‘communist’ in 1943. Maistriau was arrested in March 1944 and sent to Buchenwald but ended up in Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated in April 1945. Franklemon died in 1977. Maistriau was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1994 and died on 26 September 2008 aged 87. The attack on the twentieth convoy was historic – it was the only time in occupied Europe that Resistance fighters liberated a deportation train.
115

Maria (Mitzi –
née
Müller) Saidler (1900–94)
was a Roman Catholic woman born in rural Austria. She had acted as a live-in cook to Hermann and Camilla Fleischner for fifteen years when, due to a Nazi decree, she had to move out. It was no longer permitted for an Aryan woman under 50 years of age to live under the same roof as a Jewish man. In any event, since Hermann could no longer earn his livelihood because his wholesale button business had been ‘aryanised’,
116
they could not afford to keep her. Nevertheless, Mitzi
continued
to come to their flat to help Mrs Fleischner who had been an invalid since the early 1930s.

When they had to leave their home, ‘because a Nazi “required” it’, and had to move elsewhere where they shared a flat with several families, Mitzi continued to visit them and even brought them food. When they were ordered to be resettled at Theresienstadt, Mitzi advised them not to comply and offered to hide them in her own little flat. Because Camilla suffered from poor health, the offer was felt to be impracticable and was declined. Mitzi promptly approached a friend of the Fleischners, a Mrs Sommer, who accepted the offer and stayed with Mitzi from 1942 until the end of the war. Mitzi fed her by sharing her ration card with her. Hiding Jews could incur the death penalty, or at least deportation to a
concentration
camp, and Mitzi risked that willingly.
117

Otto Fleming, the Fleischners’ son, told me that even after his parents had been sent to Theresienstadt, Mitzi continued to send them food and also
co-operated
with the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and his wife in sending food parcels to others in Auschwitz. Chief Rabbi Öhler himself was living in the same flat as Otto’s parents, but was protected by a senior Nazi who found him work with the Jewish Archives.
118
It appears that the Fleischners were sent to the Chief Rabbi’s own flat along with four other families, so each one occupied a room in the six-bedroomed flat. As a result of the many visits she made, Mitzi and Mrs Öhler became good friends. When Otto and his wife Dorothy went back to visit Mitzi in May 1982, and to collect some valuables that the Fleischners had entrusted to Mitzi, she took them to meet Mrs Öhler, and they saw the room where they had lived.
119

Otto brought Mitzi’s actions to the attention of Yad Vashem, as did Mrs Sommer’s daughter Resi, who had worked as an interpreter in the British Embassy in Tehran during the war. She was honoured by attending with her daughter, planting a tree in the Grove of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem in March 1981; subsequently Mitzi was honoured by the Israeli Embassy in Vienna.

My informant, the Fleischners’ son, Otto Fleming, died in 2007. He had written about his family and their life in Vienna. He explained that he only
experienced anti-Semitism at the end of his time at the
gymnasium
, which must have been around 1932 as he was born in 1914. Apparently the head boy took him on one side:

After he had matriculated, he decided to study medicine, even though life was becoming difficult for Jewish students, who were being attacked and beaten up even on university premises. He started in 1933 and suffered considerable
prejudice
from all sides, but one of the most memorable occasions was when a lone woman harangued him and a friend in the street. In March 1938 he was about to take his final medical examinations when the Anschluss prevented Jews from taking finals. Jews began to be attacked in the street or dragged off to camps. He rarely left his home and eventually decided to leave Austria. However, it was not easy to find a country willing to take desperate Jews, who could be dragged off as they waited in long queues outside various embassies. Otto managed to get a ticket to Shanghai but, as he also acquired a visitor’s visa to Palestine, he left Austria in July 1938 and spent some years there. In 1942 he joined the British army, and after the war completed his medical qualifications, eventually
becoming
a GP in South Yorkshire. In 1999 he was invited back to Vienna to receive an honorary doctorate from the university, sixty-one years late.
121

Otto wrote of returning to Vienna with apprehension: