The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Twelve islanders were registered as Jews during the war, and deported to the camps. Had it not been for Albert Bedane, Mary Richardson would have been the thirteenth. One of the many French forced labourers on the island, Francis Le Sueur, to whom Bedane had given shelter for two weeks, recalled that he had also ‘sheltered a Dutch Jewess in his home for two-and-a-half years and he must have known during all that time that he would be shot if he was caught. He took a long calculated risk and he must have needed a great deal of sustained courage.’76

  THE FRENCH LAWYER and historian Serge Klarsfeld, a hidden child during the war, whose father was deported to Auschwitz and perished there, has stressed that the war against the Jews in France was more than anything a war against children. Between 1942 and 1944, 11,402 French children aged seventeen and under (some tiny babies) were deported, many of them without their parents. Only three hundred of those children survived.77 These harsh facts make the acts of rescue that did take place all the more remarkable, while also raising the ever-present question: What if more people had been able to take the risk of hiding Jews?

  Chapter 13

  Belgium and Luxembourg

  AS OF 1 JANUARY 2002 a total of 1,322 Belgian citizens had been honoured as Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.1 Ninety-four per cent of all Jews in Belgium at the outbreak of war were recent immigrants, some ninety thousand from Poland in the aftermath of the First World War, and a further twenty thousand from Germany after 1933. In spite of this, an astonishing proportion—almost half of them—managed to survive in hiding.

  In the First World War, Belgium had experienced four years of German occupation. Partly as a result, although there was a Belgian fascist movement, and even a volunteer Belgian SS division, dislike of Germany and Nazism was widespread and strong. Jewish self-help was also well-organized: the Comité de Défense des Juifs (CDJ) was able, with the help of Belgian non-Jews throughout the country, to place between three and four thousand Jewish children in hiding, and as many as ten thousand adults, many of whom entered the Belgian resistance movement.

  In September 1942, as the deportation of Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz gathered momentum, the clandestine journal Indépendence, the magazine of the underground Independence Front, circulated an appeal on behalf of the Jews. It was headed: ‘For the sake of that which you hold dearest, rescue the Jewish children who are dying abandoned.’ The article exhorted all Belgians: ‘The children are abandoned. Let us not allow them to starve but let us take them into our homes, care for them and save them from a miserable fate. Let us hide all those for whom the Gestapo are searching. Let us save them from torture, from suffering and from death in prisons and concentration camps. Contact the Independence Front (FI). It does all it can to hide and support Hitler’s victims. Make your contribution—give what you can. Think of those you love and who, thanks to the generosity of each of you, would themselves be rescued if they were ever persecuted.’2

  The response of the Belgian population was vexatious to the German occupation authorities. On 24 September 1942 the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, received a telegram from his representative in Brussels, stating that many Jews had left their homes to avoid the round-ups and ‘made efforts to find shelter with Belgian Aryans’. Ribbentrop was also told: ‘These efforts are being sustained by a considerable section of the Belgian population.’3

  Paul Duysenx and his wife Jeanne le Jeune hid a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, Benjamin Helman, from the summer of 1942 until the liberation of the city in September 1944. Like so many of those who were rescued in this way, the young man had originally been taken in for only two days; it was the willingness of his rescuers to continue to hide him for what turned out to be more than two years that enabled him to escape deportation. His older sister, Gdula, was hidden by another family and, like him, survived; but their father and mother, as well as their five-year-old sister, Gitta, were given shelter by a Belgian family who decided not to keep them, and were deported and killed.4

  Alphonse and Emilie Gonsette’s only son, active in the Belgian resistance, had been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. Defiant, they suggested to his fellow resistance members that they take a Jewish child into their home in the town of Gosselies. The boy who was brought to them, Simon Weissblum, was only two years old. His parents were active in the underground; his mother was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. She survived, and was reunited with her son when the war ended. The Gonsettes refused to accept any payment for their act of rescue.5

  Léon Platteau, General Secretary of the Belgian Ministry of Justice during the German occupation, used his position to obtain from the occupying authorities the release of Jews from Dossin detention camp at Malines (in Flemish, Mechelen), and the annulment of their deportation orders to Auschwitz. He also transferred money to the Committee for Jewish Defence to enable it to maintain two thousand people every month.6

  More than four and a half thousand Belgian Jewish children were found safe homes with Christian families, convents, boarding schools, orphanages and even sanatoriums, as a result of the efforts of Yvonne Nèvejean, the director of the National Agency for Children. On several occasions she was able to rescue children of whose whereabouts the Germans had become aware, just a few hours before they were to be deported.7

  One of those whom Yvonne Nèvejean helped to save was Berlin-born Bronia Veitch, then five years old. She was living in a Jewish children’s home when, on 30 October 1942, ‘we were rounded up by the Gestapo, and all fifty-six children and the Jewish staff were taken to Caserne Dossin, Malines. However, the train due to transport us was delayed by some hours, awaiting another transport from France. The non-Jewish housekeeper at the Home telephoned Yvonne Nèvejean, who was clandestinely involved in the civilian resistance movement, the Front de l’Indépendence (FI), which had taken the Jewish resistance movement under its wing and had established the Committee for the Defence of Jews (CDJ). She contacted the Queen Mother of Belgium, Queen Elisabeth, who during most of the day and half the night interceded with the German High Command. A huge ransom was also paid by a member of the CDJ and we as “lone children” were released during the night a very short time before the transports departed. Eight children who had been left behind alone in Caserne Dossin when their families were deported, were released along with us. The transport of 1,800 people, which left for the “East” that night, included 137 children under sixteen. All were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz/Birkenau.’

  There was a ‘constant danger’, Bronia Veitch wrote, ‘that we might be raided again at any time. The major Belgian civilian resistance movement, the Front de l’Indépendence (FI), was an umbrella movement which included priests, nuns, communists, social democrats, liberals, monarchists and people of no political or religious affiliation. They placed as many as three thousand children in hiding in 128 institutions—convents, sanatoria, homes for delicate children, and seven hundred private foster homes, all over the country. All children were given false identities and birth certificates and were cross-referenced in four secret notebooks kept in four different locations to enable the children to be traced after the war.’8

  A Belgian Christian couple, Henri and Gabrielle Bal, gave Bronia Veitch a safe haven in their home in St Niklaas. After she had been with them for eight months an Austrian officer, Wolfgang Bachata, was billeted in the house. At the dinner table, Bronia Veitch later recalled, the representative of the enemy ‘unburdened his feelings about the war to us. I recall the occasion vividly. He was distressed at Austria’s loss of independence and had been very unhappy to be called up. He was soon to be sent with his unit to Italy. We were all sitting around the dining room table and immediately my foster family set about persuading him to give himself up, as a prisoner of war, as soon as he could after reaching Italy. The conversation, in French, has remained with me all my life.’

  When, early in 1944, a Dutch Jewish family was also given refuge by Henri and Gabrielle Bal, �
�they could not adjust to being hidden’, Bronia Veitch has written. ‘As we were obliged to billet German officers at any time it was dangerous for all of us for them to remain with us for long. Although they had been found a safe hiding place with a widow deep in the country, they adamantly wanted to be smuggled to Switzerland. After the war we learned that they were caught on the Swiss border and perished. In the early 1970s, when she was over seventy, my foster mother told me that she had tried desperately to dissuade the couple from taking their children Sera and Jaap, who were two and four years older than I, with them. She tried to reason with them that although they were free to risk themselves they had no right to endanger their children’s lives, and she tried to assure them that they would be reunited when the war was over. After all those years, she would often wake up in the night crying that, if only she could have pleaded harder, Sera and Jaap would have been alive.’9

  When, in mid-1943, the deportation began of Jews with Belgian nationality—a mere 6 per cent of the total number of Jews in the country at the outbreak of war—Henri and Gabrielle Bal paid the expenses of the Litvin family when they went into hiding in Brussels.

  Bronia Veitch noted: ‘My late foster parents not only saved my life but gave me unconditional love, a wonderful childhood and were ready to risk everything for me. They were fully aware of the dangers throughout the time I was with them until the liberation. They were living examples of “good will to all”.’10

  Chawa Schneider was arrested on 7 October 1942 and deported to Auschwitz. Her husband Munisch and their six-year-old daughter Nicole (later Nicole David) were out for a walk when the Germans came to Profondeville, the small town where they were living, to arrest them. Earlier, Nicole had been looked after by nuns in the St Jean Orphanage in the town of St Servais, which, she later recalled, ‘had taken in Jewish children and treated us all equally’.

  After her mother’s arrest, young Nicole was found another family, Carlos and Celeste Champagne, who took her in. Five of their ten children were still living at home, but her hosts accepted the risk without hesitation. Her father, who had remained in Profondeville after his wife’s arrest, was in imminent danger. The local Belgian resistance advised him to go to a nearby hamlet, Besinne-Arbre, where, helped by the mayor, Jules Clobert, and the local priest, he was found a family, that of Jules and Marie Adnet, who hid him until liberation. Nicole David wrote: ‘Jules Adnet, who worked in the local Debras quarry, and Marie who took in laundry, had one daughter Josiane who was born in October 1936. Despite the difficulties in obtaining food they always shared everything with my father. In this small and isolated village there were only a few hundred inhabitants. They all knew my father, who called himself Monsieur Albert, as “the Jew who was hiding at the Adnets”. If anyone saw or heard of anything suspicious they would advise Maurice Pochet who was the owner of the only village shop, he in turn would come to warn my father.’

  Nicole David also recalled how Maurice Pochet and his wife Maria, who had three children, ‘would often take in my father and hide him in a dugout in their garden when there was fear of the Germans coming to the village. Sometimes the rumours or the fears were unfounded. However, in July 1944 a Jewish woman (who was put on the last train to leave Malines for Auschwitz) was arrested in the next village, Lesve. For three days my father stayed in the dugout in the garden of Mr and Mrs Pochet as the Germans were searching all the surrounding villages in the hope of finding more Jews. Mrs Pochet whom I visited three years ago, she was about ninety-three then, remembered this episode, the terrible fear my father was in, and his refusal of coming into the house to sleep for fear of endangering their lives even more.’

  Reflecting on her father’s rescue, Nicole David writes of how the Adnet, Clobert and Pochet families, as well as the local priest, ‘were very aware of the dangers they put themselves and their families in. The Germans were constantly looking for Jews who might be in hiding, and the Belgian population was constantly warned of the dangers they were in by helping Jews. Nevertheless, all told us after the war that they could not have done anything differently knowing the danger my father was in. After the liberation and at the end of the war Marie and Jules Adnet took me in for many months while my father was trying to rebuild his life. After the war Maurice Pochet helped my father financially by asking him to help sell his stamp collection. This helped my father to reestablish himself in business’.11

  On 24 September 1942, in Brussels, Cardinal van Roey, head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, and Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians, the Queen Mother, both intervened with the German occupation authorities after the arrest of six leading members of the Jewish community. As a result of their intervention, five were released. The sixth, Edward Rotbel, Secretary of the Belgian Jewish Community, was not a Belgian but a Hungarian citizen; thus Belgian intervention could not save him. He was deported to Auschwitz two days later.12

  Cardinal van Roey encouraged several institutions under his jurisdiction to open their gates to Jewish children, one of them being the orphanage of St Joseph. He also approved a means to save a number of Jewish women. One of the children given sanctuary at the St Joseph orphanage, Alexander Levy, has written of how his mother was saved as a result of a device thought up by the Cardinal, who among his other acts of rescue had opened a geriatric centre in which Jews were given shelter: ‘As these elderly Jews “required” kosher food, and Christian cooks would be unable to prepare such a specialized diet, he required Jewish cooks to do the job. These Jewish cooks were given special passes protecting them against deportation, and my mother was one of these cooks.’13

  The Queen Elisabeth Castle in Jamoigne was a home for the children of Belgian soldiers, sailors and airmen. It was run from day to day by Marie Taquet, an army officer’s wife. In 1943 she took into the home and under her wing eighty Jewish children. All their names were changed to Christian-sounding ones, and they were dispersed among the other children in the home, without any of the other children knowing that they were Jewish. All of them were saved.14

  The Lajbman brothers, eleven-year-old Isaac and four-year-old Bernard, had already been in hiding with families in Wilrijk (near Antwerp) and Marcinelles (near Charleroi) when lack of food and sanitation in their foster homes forced them to seek sanctuary elsewhere. Reaching Tourinnes-St-Lambert, Isaac was taken in by Alphonse and Marie Quintin, and Bernard by the Ravet family. Both families treated the boys as their own sons.15

  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.’16

  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 194
4 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.17

  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.18

  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.19