The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (37 page)

In an essay on the rescue of Jewish children in Belgium during the Second World War, Mordecai Paldiel has recorded the story of an entire village that served as a refuge for fleeing children. This was Cornement-Louveigné, a hamlet of ten families near Liège, where each family sheltered one or more Jewish children and was supported by the local mayor in this effort. The area in which this tiny hamlet was located was an important centre of resistance activity, and the Germans were constantly looking for members of the underground—besides ‘dropping by’ to pick up fresh milk and eggs. Thus, there was real danger here; but no one informed on the Jewish children or their guardians.

Paldiel also writes of a private, non-religious Belgian institution in Ottignies in which Jewish children were sheltered. Before the war it was a private boarding school for psychologically disturbed children, headed by René Jacqumotte, ‘who gradually emptied the school of its Gentile boarders and replaced them with about twenty Jewish children. The Jewish youngsters received private tutoring, with the underground covering their maintenance expenses.’
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In October 1942 the Gestapo ordered all Jews in Belgium to register with the police. Many parents took immediate steps to place their children in the care of non-Jews willing to take the risk of harbouring them in their homes, often in remote villages. Sometimes whole families were able to find a secure hiding place. Charlotte Birnbaum was five years old in October 1942 when she and her mother, elder brother, grandparents and an aunt fled from Antwerp to the Ardennes, where they stayed with an elderly couple. They remained with them until September 1944 when that part of Belgium was liberated by the United States army. The elderly couple, Joseph and Leonie Morand, did their utmost to help them without any reward other than the rent for the accommodation provided.
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German-born Beatrice Muchman and her cousin Henri were given a safe haven by two Catholic sisters in the Belgian village of Ottignies. Nine years old at the time, she later recalled: ‘Henri and I owed our lives to Marianne and Adèle, but we also owed our lives to the whole village. Almost everyone in Ottignies knew our secret and the secrets of the other Jewish children hidden there, but no one reported us to the German soldiers who patrolled the area. (Out of 4,000 Jewish children hiding in Belgium, 3,000 were saved precisely because of this kind of quiet, unsung heroism.) My parents, of course, made the ultimate sacrifice—giving up their only child. But, being a child, I had no idea what an agonizing decision it was for them. I thought they were abandoning me when in reality they were saving me. Like so many others who lost loved ones during the Holocaust, I learned very little about what happened to my parents.’ Neither, in fact, survived the war.
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Sara Lamhaut was eleven years old when the Gestapo arrested her parents, members of the Belgian resistance. She first found sanctuary with the Sisters of Saint Mary near Mons, then in an abandoned convent in Sugny, and finally at the convent school of the Sisters of Saint Mary in Wezembeek-Oppem, near Brussels. There, under the assumed name of Jeannine van Meerhaegen, she took her First Communion.
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The Spiessens were Belgian farmers in the small town of Boom, near Antwerp. The couple offered shelter on their farm to two Jews, Cecile Seiden and her mother, from Antwerp. The Spiessens’ son Harry and his wife Joss took them from Antwerp to Boom hidden in a hay cart. Cecile Seiden later recalled: ‘Along the way we passed many patrols that examined Harry and Joss’s papers. We were hidden under hay and vegetables in his little open truck. At one of the checkpoints they rifled the hay looking for contraband and anything else that they could confiscate. When the rifle entered the hay, it went past my mother’s ear and she whimpered. The guard snarled: “What do you have there?” Harry answered, “A pig, he must have grunted!” Lucky for us, he believed Harry. They let us pass and didn’t confiscate the pig. Joss and Harry risked their lives for us, they could have been shot.’

The Spiessens’ daughter Natalie, who lived in a nearby village with her husband, was not told that the newcomers were Jewish. ‘Mrs Spiessen concealed the fact that she was hiding a Jewish woman and child from her own daughter. Many times at the dinner table, the conversation turned to the subject of Jews and Natalie would chime in—“They deserve what they get!” Being a young child I was not aware of these conversations but many times the food got stuck in my mother’s throat, as Natalie would speak.

‘For appearance sake, I attended the local Roman Catholic Church communion class. The Spiessens were devout Catholics. The local priest and I became good friends and I tried to learn my catechisms. After being on the farm for many months, I developed a medical problem because of malnutrition from the war. The closest medical help was a Convent in Malines, which was the deportation center for all Jews from Belgium to concentration and death camps. We waited for many hours in the crowded outer office until our turn came. I was put onto a table and the sisters proceeded to remove my scabs and treated the wounds. The pain was terrible and I was brave by not screaming too much. While this operation was going on, Mrs Spiessen overheard two nuns speaking to each other.’

‘Sister, did you see the huge lines of children waiting to be put on the trains? They looked so frightened, so scared!’

‘Sister, don’t worry, they are not ours, they are only Jewish children!’

Cecile Seiden recalled how Mrs Spiessen ‘could not believe what she heard, tears came to her eyes, she bit her lip she wanted to cry out. She suddenly became silent. All the way home, she didn’t say one word but just squeezed my hand very tightly. Why didn’t Mrs Spiessen speak to me, I felt that I had been so brave. That evening at the dinner table, there was not too much talk.’

Later, Cecile Seiden and her mother were to make their way to Switzerland. Her father, taken from Belgium to Auschwitz, was one of the few Belgian deportees who survived.
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Many of the rescuers in Belgium, as in other countries, were people with few means: hard-working farmers like the Spiessens. It was a ‘fairly poor socialist family, living in the miners’ county (Borinage) of Belgium’ that sheltered the young Goldschläger boy. That boy’s younger brother Alain, born after the war, later wrote: ‘My father in his naiveté had given my brother the name Christian in 1939, thinking that the Germans would not pursue a child with that name! The Socialist Party had a strong tradition of anti-racism and anti-persecution.’ Alain Goldschläger added: ‘Belgium has a remarkable record of saving children. I think it was perceived as a way to fight the Germans. Anti-Semitism was also not as rooted as in some other countries like Holland. The organization for helping Jewish children in Brussels was quite admirable and extended, involving a large number of non-Jews and established services. A Catholic newspaper summed up the position quite well: “Even if we do not like Jews, they do not deserve the persecution.” There was a basic “good will” that manifested itself either by active participation in the rescue, or more often by a passive non-involvement in the persecution which gave room and time for others to act.’
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In Brussels, Father Anton de Breuker, the pastor of St Marie Scharbeeck church, gave shelter to ten-year-old Dora Londner-Conforti, after her parents had been taken to the deportation centre at Dossin, from where they were deported to Auschwitz and their deaths. To protect the girl’s identity Father Anton adopted her, and, a year later, moved her to a Carmelite convent ‘that had been specially instructed to conceal Jewish girls’.
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Elisabeth Maxwell has recorded the story of Madame Ovart, who ran a home where Jewish children were hidden. ‘One Whitsun, the Christian children had gone back home and only the Jewish children were left. The Gestapo raided the building and, having terrified the children, took them away for deportation. They also arrested Mme Ovart. When they expressed surprise as to why a Christian would hide Jewish children, she answered, “I am a Belgian…Here, we do not ask for children’s identity to teach them to read and write!” She died in Ravensbrück and her husband, who was also arrested, died in Buchenwald.’
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Shortly before being deported to Auschwitz, Chana and Benjamin Borzykowski managed to place their four-year-old son Jacky in a kindergarten in Brussels. There he was cared for by Andrée Geulen, a member both of the Belgian underground and of the Committee for the Defence of the Jews. She entrusted him to two sisters, Madeleine and Marcel de Meulemeester, also members of the resistance. They, in turn, brought Jacky to their brother and sister-in-law, John and Josiane de Meulemeester. He hid with them from 1943 to 1944 until it became too dangerous, when the de Meulemeester sisters took him to Father de Wolf Desirée in the village of Buggenhout. The priest arranged for Jacky to stay on the farm of Franz and Maria Julia van Gerwen. The boy lived with the van Gerwens and their two daughters, Maria Desirée and Amelie, for over two years; during this time he was baptized a Catholic, and lived and worked as part of the family.

Chana and Benjamin Borzykowski were murdered at Auschwitz. Jacky’s aunt found him after her own liberation from Dachau; later he went to Israel with a group of other orphans.
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Both Catholic and Protestant churches in Belgium were active in helping Jews. The head of the Protestant church in Belgium, Pastor Marc Boegner, issued clear instructions to his flock that they should help persecuted Jews, and himself helped large numbers of Jews to find sanctuary in France. One institution to which he sent Jews for safety was the Adventists’ Seminary at Collognes, in Haute Savoie, not far from the Swiss border.
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Many Belgian nunneries and convents, too, gave sanctuary to Jewish children and pretended they were Christian. In Namur, Father Joseph André, an abbot, found room within his monastery and in monasteries and nunneries elsewhere for as many as a hundred children. After liberation he brought them all to the Jewish community leaders.
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Nor was this the sum total of his efforts on behalf of Jews. An American rabbi, then a chaplain with the United States forces, Captain Harold Saperstein, told the
New York Times
shortly after the war of how Father André ‘got local Catholic families to hide Jews in their households. He gave up his own bed to Jewish refugees, and during the entire period slept on the floor of his study. He carried food to families in hiding, and messages from parents to children. All this was done from his own home, next door to the hotel used as Gestapo headquarters, now taken over for our billet. During the final months of Nazi occupation he was compelled to go into hiding himself, his own life being endangered. During the course of two years he saved more than two hundred lives.’ Rabbi Saperstein also reported that, with liberation, Father André made sure that orphaned Jewish children who had been hidden in Catholic institutions were given into the charge of Jewish people, ‘who could ill afford the additional loss of small numbers of Jewish children after their overwhelming losses of recent years’.
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Also among the institutions that hid Jews were the Convent of the Franciscan Sisters in Bruges, the Protestant orphanage at Uccle, and the convent of the Sisters of Don Bosco, in Courtrai, where fourteen Jewish children were hidden. Only two of the nuns here were aware that any of the children were Jewish; even the Jewish children themselves, among them eight-year-old Leon Fischler, did not know that any of the other children were Jewish.
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Four Jewish girls were given refuge at the Sisters of Saint Mary convent school in the village of Wezembeek-Oppem, near Brussels; six were saved from deportation at the Dominican convent of Lubbeek, near Hasselt, hidden in the cellar by the Mother Superior when the Gestapo came to the convent in search of Belgians to deport for forced labour.
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When Ursula Klipstein’s German-born parents, Irma and Leo, were arrested—also German-born, she was then twelve years old—she approached a Christian friend of the family, who found her a hiding place in a convent near Braine-l’Alleud. Run by the Sisters of Saint Mary, the convent was home to twenty-five students, half of whom were Jewish children in hiding. Ursula, who was given the name Janine Hambenne, stayed at the convent from June 1943 until the liberation in September 1944.

After their arrest, Ursula’s parents were taken to the transit camp at Malines. One evening the inmates were allowed a cultural evening, which was attended by the German staff as well as the prisoners. At this event, Irma Klipstein read out a poem she had written about camp life. The camp commandant, who recognized by her accent that she was from the same part of Germany as himself, was impressed by her poem, and in appreciation arranged for her and husband to be employed in the camp, rather than be deported to the East. Irma continued to work in Malines as a maid, and Leo as a carpenter, until liberation.
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The smallest of Jewish children were in danger: each deportation from Belgium, as from France and Holland, contained young children, often deported without their parents. A Christian nurse who worked at the Brussels hospital where Marguerite-Rose Birnbaum was born on 4 February 1943, arranged for her parents to hide in an abbey in Limbourg, with a priest, Armand Elens. The priest spoke with his sister, Marie-Josephe Dincq, saying, in code, that he had a suit and dress (that is, Lazar and Frida Birnbaum) and a small dress (Marguerite-Rose). He added that he would keep the suit and dress, and asked his sister to pick up the small dress. Madame Dincq picked up seven-month-old Marguerite-Rose and brought her to her home in Arendonk, where she lived with her husband Pierre and three children, aged between ten and six. Marguerite-Rose was baptized in St Joseph’s church as the godchild of Pierre and Marie-Josephe Dincq. Pierre Dincq, a member of the Belgian resistance, was arrested in the spring of 1944 and died in Dachau. In the summer of 1945 the Birnbaums retrieved their daughter, by that time a healthy two-year-old.
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