The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (38 page)

Annette Lederman was born in 1940, her sister Margot in 1941. When the round-ups of Jews in Brussels began, Annette’s mother made contact with the Belgian underground through a Catholic priest. Annette was placed in hiding with a Christian family, but she was so homesick that her rescuer returned her to her parents. On 31 October 1942, Annette’s father was deported to Auschwitz. Her mother then resolved to hide both girls with a Christian family. She made contact with Clementine and Edouard Frans van Buggenhout, who lived in the village of Rumst, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. The van Buggenhouts had three older children. Their two sons, Roger and Sylvan, were away most of the time in forced labour battalions, but their teenage daughter, Lydia, helped care for the Lederman sisters.

While Annette and Margot were in hiding, their mother was deported to Auschwitz on the penultimate transport from Belgium in 1944. After learning that both parents had been killed, Clementine and Edouard van Buggenhout sought to adopt the girls, but the village priest would not sanction the adoption ‘since there was no formal indication that this would have been the wish of the parents’. In due course the two girls were found a home with a Jewish family in the United States.
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As more and more ‘Hidden Children’ began to tell their stories, the courage of Father Bruno—the Reverend Henri Reynders—became more and more well known. For those he saved he was a true ‘hero’.
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He helped find places of safety for 320 Jewish children, dozens of whom have given testimony to his courage.
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Father Bruno, a Benedictine monk, had paid a visit to Germany in 1938 and had been distressed by what he saw. ‘I was strolling in a busy street,’ he later recalled. ‘Everywhere I saw insulting signs: “Jude = Judas”, “Juden heraus” or “Hier sind Juden nicht erwünschen”. It shocked me greatly, but what truly revolted me was the following incident: I saw an old man arriving, bearded, dressed in a caftan, wearing an old black hat, in short the stereotyped Jew. This old man walked stooped, not daring to raise his eyes, hiding his face with his hand. Passersby walked away from him as if he had the plague, or they bullied him, or pointed a finger and sneered at him. This really upset me, this segregation, this contempt, this arrogance, this cruel stupidity, no…it was unbearable! It still lingers in my memory and makes me nauseous.’
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While serving as a Belgian army chaplain in 1940, Father Bruno was wounded, captured and made a prisoner of war. It would be a year before he was released. In 1942 he was sent by the Father Superior of his order to take up the post of chaplain at a small Catholic institution, the Home for the Blind at Hodbomont. ‘He quickly finds out’, as his nephew Dr Michel Reynders later wrote, ‘that the director, a Mr Walter Bieser, can see as well as he, and so does an elderly couple from Vienna, the Ashkenazys, and a Mr Silbermann. It is, in reality, a front for the true mission of the Home: to hide Jews in danger of being arrested. The management and most of the guests, including five or six genuinely blind children, are all Jews.’

The children at the home had recently been transferred there from L’Hospitalité, a charitable institution run by the Catholic Church to provide holiday camps for disadvantaged children, sponsored by the Diocese of Liège, and under the leadership of a lawyer from Liège, Albert Van den Berg. ‘That house had, for some time, sheltered Jewish families,’ Michel Reynders wrote, ‘but the parents had just been arrested in a Gestapo raid (according to Father B none came back alive from Birkenau). For some unknown reason, the Nazis ignored the children, who were at once removed to Hodbomont. Upon his arrival, Father Bruno takes them under his care.’

Towards the end of 1942, Albert Van den Berg and Father Bruno decided that the Hodbomont house was no longer safe. In the words of Michel Reynders: ‘Villagers know about the true situation and a careless, even inadvertent word can trigger a tragedy. Indeed, many arrests are reported in the area: adults and children must be dispersed, shelters must be found…thus begins the monk’s rescue operation.’

Michel Reynders, then a teenager, played his own part in his uncle’s rescue endeavours, serving, he writes, as ‘an occasional letter carrier or escort for a brief trip within the city of Brussels’.
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Father Bruno’s work began on a small scale. In January 1943 he found ten families, some with between four and ten children of their own, willing to shelter Jews: these included the Bodarts, the Bertrands and the Martens of Louvain, and other families in Jodoigne, Ciney, Brussels, Namur and Bouge. To place Jews in these families, Michel Reynders noted, ‘requires relentless work, constant and laborious travel (Father B most often rides his bicycle: at war’s end he will have pedaled forty to fifty times as much as bicycle racers of the tour of Belgium!) but he never finds a closed door.’ At first, there was no organization: ‘Everything must be improvised, food supplies, clothing, false identification papers, new “aryanized” names, not to mention financial needs. Mr Van den Berg generously spends his own money, but, being a monk, Father Bruno owns nothing and must depend on gifts from friends and relatives. Besides, the children must be kept occupied and must pursue their studies. Fortunately, this can be arranged through school managers all over Belgium.’

In April 1943 Father Bruno found shelter for another sixteen Jewish children and adults; in May for a further seventeen; and in July for eighteen more. By the time his office in the abbey at Mont César was being raided by the Gestapo, he was handling his 159th rescue. He managed just in time to hide the incriminating documents, including lists of the non-Jewish-sounding names under which the children were being hidden. He then continued with his work of rescue, living at different addresses, first in Louvain and then in Brussels. In Brussels, he lived in the house next door to the office of an SS captain of the Office of Jewish Affairs. From that house, Father Bruno organized 150 rescues, and even hid Jews for several hours in the house itself before they were taken to their safe haven. His nephew Michel writes that, supported by Bishop Kerkhofs of Liège and in co-operation with Van den Berg, ‘the priest places “his” children in numerous religious institutions: the Sisters of Bellegem, the Home of Leffe, the Benedictine Abbey of Liège where his own sister (Mother Therèse) is stationed, St Mary’s boarding house at La Bouverie, the Jolimont Clinic, the nuns of Don Bosco in Courtrai, and many others.’

For his part, Van den Berg continued to place Jewish children in the three Capuchin Banneux homes, where Father Jamin and the monks Avelin, Fulbert and Jaminet cared for them. Among those sheltered in the Banneux homes were the Grand Rabbi of Liège, Joseph Lepkifker, and his elderly parents. The old couple were eventually caught and deported, to their deaths; Rabbi Lepkifker survived the war, leaving the homes with what Michel Reynders calls ‘the memory of a deeply religious man, open to good relations with Christianity’. He adds: ‘An exceptional man, true apostle of kindness, Albert Van den Berg is arrested in April 1943, given a light sentence but, when freed from jail, is re-arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp where he was to die on the eve of liberation.’

Just before the German withdrawal, Father Bruno performed a final act of rescue in Brussels, in the Place du Chatelain. There he brought, and then found a home for, three children who had escaped the possibility of a last-minute deportation and spent the previous night in the Forest of Soignes: ‘I never saw’, Father Bruno recalled, ‘children so eager to let themselves be scrubbed and cleansed in my basement, and with such exuberance!’ He took the three children, aged eight and ten, to the Daughters of Charity in Asse, eight miles from Brussels, after which he returned to Brussels on foot, just in time to see German troops leave the city, never to return.’
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In 1992, fifty years after Father Bruno began his rescue efforts, nine of those who owed their lives to him held a commemoration in a private home in Maplewood, New Jersey. A journalist who was present, Joseph Berger, recorded their stories for the
New York Times
. ‘I think he was one of the very few good people,’ said Jack Goldstein, the host of the reunion. ‘He saw what was being done was wrong. Were it the reverse situation, I don’t know how many people would have done what he did. Père Bruno, as he was known, was a slender, gentle man in his thirties with sharp eyes twinkling out from behind the spectacles of a scholar. A university teacher, he was an expert on the early Christian communities, which were made up of people who called themselves Jews but adhered to the teachings of Christ.’

Rachelle Goldstein was two and a half years old when she and her elder brother Jacques, aged nine, were found a hiding place in a Protestant orphanage in Uccle in July 1942. They stayed there, with several cousins, for eight months, until another child ran away from the orphanage and threatened to denounce the Jewish children. It was Father Bruno who found them other places to go. Rachelle was found sanctuary in the Convent of the Franciscan Sisters in Bruges, under the name of Lily Willems.
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When Rachelle learned she would be staying there, she burst into tears. Some months later a woman member of the resistance came to the convent and left her a doll, a present from her mother. ‘She told me my parents knew where I was,’ Rachelle Goldstein recalled. ‘It meant everything to me.’

A year later, after the liberation of Belgium, Rachelle was playing in the convent garden when a man and woman came to see her. She did not recognize them until the woman embraced her. ‘When I went close to the woman, I recognized my mother by her scent.’

Jack Goldstein was nine years old when his mother took him and his twin brother to a train station to meet Father Bruno. He immediately gave them new names and new identity papers. They stayed the night with a doctor who, the next day, hid them under a blanket in the car. The doctor and Father Bruno talked their way through several German roadblocks to a convent, where the children spent the next six months. ‘I didn’t know if I would ever see my parents again,’ said Jack Goldstein. ‘I lived in fear. I studied Christianity. I went to church every morning, but I knew of my Jewish heritage.’

Many of Father Bruno’s children made their way to the United States, where a remarkable quirk of destiny brought two of them together. Rachelle and Jack Goldstein did not know each other as children; they met in 1955 at a dance. Rachelle inquired about Jack’s European accent, and the tale he told led to the discovery that they had been saved by the same man.

Another young boy, Bernard Rotmil, was hidden on a farm as a teenager and recalled that Father Bruno used to ride for many miles on a bicycle to visit him in hiding, to try to relieve his homesickness. Ultimately, he said, Father Bruno ‘is best described by the simple Yiddish word for a decent person. He was a mensch.’

Flora Singer was helping her mother by taking jobs packing soap powder and assisting a dressmaker ‘when Père Bruno stopped by and asked whether she would rather go to school. Her mother said that in order to eat they needed the money Flora brought in, so Père Bruno offered to bring the family food if Flora went to school. He then arranged for her to be hidden safely, for eleven months.
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In recent years, Flora Singer frequently talks about Father Bruno when she gives lectures in the United States about the Righteous. ‘I hold him up as an example of what a human being should be’, she has written; ‘he was certainly a model to be emulated.’
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‘The last time I saw Père Bruno’, wrote Paul Silvers, one of the 320 youngsters for whom Father Henri Reynders found a safe haven in Belgium, ‘was shortly after the liberation of Belgium. It was during the Jewish High Holidays of 1944. The Dutch Synagogue in Brussels was packed with worshippers. The Rabbi suddenly halted the service and announced that Père Bruno had just come in for a final visit with “his children” before joining the Belgian troops as a chaplain. The reception given Père Bruno by the congregation was tumultuous. Kids were clinging to his arms and tearful parents were showering him with thanks and blessings. It took a long time for decorum to return to the synagogue and for the services to resume. When I looked for him, Père Bruno had quietly slipped out.’
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IN BELGIUM, AS
in every German-occupied country, and in Germany itself, it often took many non-Jews, working together or at different times over several years, to save a single Jew. Martin Glassman and his younger brother Gary left Italy in April 1939 with their Polish-born maternal grandparents to comply with an Italian law that all foreign-born Jews must leave Italy. Their destination was Brussels. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, they were interned by the Belgian authorities, as foreign aliens, at Camp Marneffe. There, having reached the age of thirteen, Martin Glassman had his barmitzvah. After the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 they were released, and set off in the direction of Namur, but the German forces soon overran the whole country and they returned to occupied Brussels.

The first help given to Martin Glassman by a non-Jew came when he reached the age of fifteen and required his own identity card. A forged card was provided by Dr Thys, a member of the Belgian resistance who later took part in an attack on a deportation train—the twentieth train that left Malines for Auschwitz.

On the run from the forced labour decree issued by the Germans at the end of May 1942, Martin Glassman and his brother Gary were taken in by Madame Holland and her son Paul in their boarding house in Rhode St Genese outside Brussels. Their uncle Arthur Hellman was also found sanctuary, by Dr Thys and Madame Holland, in a tuberculosis clinic; later he returned to his home. The boys’ grandparents, Emelie and Heinrich Hellman, were caught and arrested, then deported to Auschwitz and their deaths.