by Tony Ortega
The three men, and another named Ghislain Jules de Wulf, had been tight for more than a decade. De Hoo was an Amsterdam bureaucrat who often came to Antwerp. Bucholc was a highly skilled leatherworker who had emigrated to the Belgian city from Poland in the late 1920s with his young wife, Ruchla Minkowski.
The four young men had become confidants and looked out for each other. When De Hoo went on an arduous Arctic expedition in 1930, Bucholc fashioned some custom leather clothing for the trip. In 1938, when De Hoo was offered the opportunity to take over the Bata shoe factory in Warsaw, he planned on taking Bucholc with him and even talked with Rodrigues Lopes about joining them. But doubts about conditions in Poland convinced them not to go.
The next year, as Europe was once again plunged into war, de Hoo and Rodrigues Lopes each went through divorces; Rodrigues Lopes moved to Holland, but in 1941 he returned to Belgium as conditions for Jews in Amsterdam deteriorated more rapidly than they had in Antwerp, which fell to the Nazis in May, 1940.
Under Nazi occupation in Holland, De Hoo was put in charge of food rationing. Increasingly, he was in a difficult spot: He had to serve the Nazi occupiers, but he also wanted to help his Jewish friends, who were running out of options. And in Antwerp, things were getting increasingly dangerous for Rodrigues Lopes, and for Chaim and Ruchla Bucholc, who were in hiding with their two-year-old daughter, Sarah.
When Chaim was arrested, not only did he leave behind his young daughter, but Ruchla was very pregnant with their second child. Just four days after Chaim was taken away, on July 26, 1942, Ruchla gave birth to another daughter. She was named Paula, and Chaim never laid eyes on her.
He was likely held for only about a week at the Breendonck concentration camp before he was among some of the first Jews moved to the Dossin barracks at the new Mechelen transport center, from which Belgium’s incarcerated Jews were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
On September 10, 1942, Chaim Bucholc was among 1,048 prisoners on a train designated Transport VIII. This early in the war, the transport appeared to be a normal passenger train, and not the cattle trucks that would come into use later, after the Nazis became concerned about escapes. Three days later, the train arrived in Auschwitz, where Chaim was eventually executed.
Back in Belgium, Ruchla had to rely on family members to bring her things so she and the children could remain cooped up in their second-story apartment and away from prying eyes. For three months, she and the girls stayed off the street. But eventually Ruchla had to risk a trip for supplies, and she was arrested, leaving behind the note that was discovered by her brother.
Ruchla Minkowski Bucholc, aged 31, was sent to Auschwitz on October 24, 1942.
Paula and Sarah remained in hiding for several months through the help of family friends as well as a Belgian official – Robert de Foy – who helped many other Jews stay out of the Nazi camps.
De Foy was in a tricky position. He had been head of the Belgian State Security Service before the war, and was sent to Ger-many as a prisoner. But the Nazis then sent him back to Belgium to help administer the country. In 1943, he had been appointed Secretary General of the Department of Justice. He was aiding the Nazis by helping to run the country, but he would posthumously be named one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem for his efforts to help Jews during the war.
But even with de Foy’s help, the girls were ultimately discovered by Nazi troops. On June 18, 1943, they were taken to Mechelen to await transport to Auschwitz. Paula was assigned to be the 843rd passenger on Transport XXI, the next train scheduled to leave.
It would be only the second transport to use windowless cattle cars to prevent escapes. (About 200 passengers managed to escape that April when the Belgian resistance derailed Transport XX about 6 miles after it left the camp.)
Their parents’ friends – Sijbren de Hoo, Ghislain de Wulf, and Leonard Rodrigues Lopes – now began a desperate attempt to save the two children. Their one advantage, it turned out, was that the Nazi running the Dossin barracks, SS Sturmbannführer Philipp Schmitt, was as corrupt as he was brutal.
Leo Rodrigues Lopes had some kind of connection inside the camp—a prisoner who was being used in the camp administration, perhaps—and through that connection he hoped to sway Schmitt with a bribe.
He and De Hoo and de Wulf could do nothing when Chaim and Ruchla Bucolc were each arrested and then sent to Auschwitz. But when the girls were captured, they worked rapidly to raise cash. De Hoo used an inheritance to come up with 100,000 Dutch Guilders, and Rodrigues Lopes gathered another 10,000 of his own through friends. A wealthy man in manufacturing may also have helped contribute, as well as some Catholic organizations. Some of the cash was converted to food, bought on the black market through de Hoo’s Ministry contacts, because Schmitt was apparently willing to accept a combination of such goods as well as hard cash.
Rodrigues Lopes and de Hoo had very little time for their scheme to work. Not only were the girls scheduled to leave on the next transport, but Schmitt himself was so crooked, even the Nazis considered him a disaster and soon replaced him. But that summer, Schmitt had been disciplined but not yet removed, and a bribe was raised to pay him off as well as a man named Lauterborn – who might have been the notorious Flemish Jew Hunter Felix Lauterborn.
On July 31, 1943, five days after Paula’s first birthday, Transport XXI left Mechelen bound for Auschwitz with 1,553 prisoners, including 174 children, 71 of them girls.
Paula and Sarah Bucholc were not on that train. The next month, in August, a record of them appeared, showing that they had been moved to an orphanage. The bribe had worked.
Tante Brunya’s orphanage was their fourth. They had been moved there, near Brussels, at some point after the war was over. Paula – more often now called Paulette for her small size – had vague memories of the previous places. But she had formed a strong impression of Brunya, who seemed to favor her.
But then Brunya had taken another girl, DeeDee, and had gone to America, and this was very difficult for Paulette to understand. She felt very alone – her sister Sarah was usually in another part of the orphanage because she was two years older, and then Sarah left entirely, taken home by their aunt, who lived in Antwerp.
Paulette knew nothing about her parents. She didn’t know how lucky she was just to be alive. She had no way of knowing that her aunt couldn’t afford to bring her home as well. She just knew that no one came to see her—except for one time, when they family had come for her fifth birthday, and gave her a toy ball she kept on a string.
And then, when she turned six years old, everything changed.
In the summer of 1936, Stella Toepfer went to an Adirondacks resort named Green Mansions, and she met a salesman who was there playing tennis. His name was Ted Cooper. A year later, they were married. Stella’s two brothers, Abe and Dave, had inherited their father’s diamond business, S. Toepfer Diamonds. After the war, during which Ted had been an X-ray technician in the Army, he joined the family firm and learned the gem trade.
Ted and Stella wanted to have children, but couldn’t. Stella tried to solve their fertility problem, receiving daily injections at one point. But they suspected the problem may have been rooted in Ted’s X-ray work stateside during the war – he had not received any protective clothing to use. After the war, they approached adoption agencies, but already in their late 30s, they were told they weren’t ideal candidates because of their age.
One night, at a party in New York, they met a Belgian woman named Roska Fuss who asked them why they didn’t have children. When they told her that they’d tried and failed, she said that her brother ran an orphanage in Belgium. Roska had one particular girl in mind. But she knew there might be a problem: Paulette Bucholc had been promised to a Philadelphia couple, both psychiatrists.
Roska decided she liked the Coopers, and sent word to have little Paulette adopted by them. But there was another hurdle: Sarah, Paulette’s older sister, had already been adop
ted by their aunt, Chaim’s sister. The aunt didn’t want the two girls split up, but she couldn’t afford to take in Paulette as well, so Paulette just sat in the orphanage. With the aunt refusing to budge, the Coopers were forced to wait for several months.
Ted then sent a friend to Belgium with two sets of documents that had been drawn up by his lawyer and former mess sergeant, Irving Gruber. One set of papers released Paulette from the orphanage to her aunt, the other set released her to the Coopers. The man sent by Ted Cooper stayed with the aunt and said he wasn’t leaving until she signed one set of papers. Finally, she relented and signed Paulette over to the Coopers.
The aunt, however, got some measure of revenge. The day before Paulette was scheduled to fly to the United States, her aunt had her brought to her home, where Paulette’s sister Sarah had been living after the aunt had adopted her. It was the first time the two girls had seen each other in two years. And before Paulette left in the morning, the aunt told them, “Kiss each other goodbye, girls, because you’ll never see each other again.”
The Coopers had already decided to give Paulette the middle name of Marcia, after Ted’s father, Morris. Sarah, meanwhile, grew up with the name Suzy.
Nine months after the Coopers first heard about the girl in Belgium from their friend Roska – a span Stella considered highly significant – she and Ted received a telegram that a couple of days later the girl would arrive at Idlewild Airport.
On her flight to New York, Paulette was accompanied by a Belgian woman who taught her to say “I love you” in English. (Paulette, who was six, spoke only French.) During the long flight, she managed to throw up on the woman. Her only possession, besides a purple dress the orphanage had scrounged up for her, was the toy ball on a string she still took everywhere.
It was August 18, 1948, and one of the hottest days of the year when they landed at Idlewild. During the long, stifling wait for customs, the dye on Paulette’s cheap purple velvet dress began to run.
Because they were coming from Belgium, the world’s diamond market, the US Customs officials decided that the woman traveling with Paulette might be a smuggling risk. They were pulled aside and searched, and for some time Paulette’s toy ball became the focus of their attention – were there gems inside it?
The officials were impatient, yelling at the woman and the little girl to stop acting like they only spoke French.
“We know you speak English!” they barked.
Finally, a tall man walked in and swooped Paulette up into his arms.
“I’m Ted Cooper, this is my daughter, and I’m taking her now. My lawyer is Irving Gruber. If you don’t like it, call him.”
It was the first time Paulette laid eyes on the man who had adopted her.
During her years in the orphanage, Paulette had never been told what happened to her biological parents. She only knew that other children had visitors, but her aunt’s family was too destitute to come see her. Paulette wondered what could be so wrong with her to make her parents never come.
Now, she was in New York, and the tall man, Ted Cooper, introduced her to his wife, Stella. These were the parents who had never come, Paulette thought. And that’s why the first words she spoke to her new mother were, “Why did it take you so long to get me?”
It was in French, and the Coopers didn’t understand.
Underweight, malnourished, frightened, ill from the vaccinations she’d been given upon arriving, and missing her sister, Paulette Cooper’s first months in the United States were a nightmare both for her and her parents. She spoke no English, and when she woke up in the night, crying and asking for her sister Suzy, her mother at first thought she was asking for a lollipop (“sucette” in French).
Stella Cooper even thought, briefly, of sending Paulette back to Belgium. But Stella’s mother, who lived upstairs in the same building at 200 Pinehurst in Washington Heights, told her adoption was forever. “You couldn’t return Paulette if you’d given birth to her, and you can’t return her now that she’s adopted,” her grandmother said.
And so Stella got used to the idea of her hyperactive, undersized daughter who only gradually began to speak English.
The Coopers lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The dining room was converted into a room for Paulette. More than food, she was hungering for love and attention, something she didn’t get in the series of orphanages she had lived in. She charmed adults not only because she was so small for her age, but also for her French accent, and for leaping up to kiss everyone she came in contact with, even the mailman.
In school, she struggled as she learned English, and she had a hard time sitting still. Not understanding what was being said, at times she’d just get up and wander out of the room. At home, though, she sat still and read everything she could get her hands on.
Gradually, she gained friends. Her best friend, Nora, had a very interesting aunt. Her name was Yma Sumac, and the exotic Peruvian singer with a 4-octave vocal range would come over often and sing. Paulette loved music and learned piano and could play Rachmaninoff by the time she was 10. But mostly, she loved reading.
By eight years old, she was putting out a newsletter with other children in the building. Every page was written by hand, and were then sold for a penny a page. Already, she knew that she wanted to be a writer. One of her early newsletters contained her first poem:
Whenever I am very ill, I have to swallow a big fat pill
It gives me dreams I’ve never seen
In Technicolor I’m a queen
I have a crown, shiny and gold
So you see it’s not so bad to have a cold. Achoo.
She had seen the admiration in her father’s eyes when he said that Stella had published some writing years earlier while a student at NYU. Paulette wanted badly to see that same admiration in her father’s eyes, and it helped her focus on becoming a writer.
In 1950, two years after she arrived in New York, Paulette was formally adopted and given citizenship at the same time. Her parents and the family attorney, Irving Gruber, were with her while a friendly Manhattan judge asked, “Do you like your country?”
Yes, she answered.
“Do you like your parents?”
Yes.
“OK, you are now a citizen of the United States and you are adopted by the Coopers,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to ask me any arithmetic?” a disappointed Paulette asked.
Paulette began to excel at PS 187, where one of her classmates was Hedda Nussbaum, who would go on to become the center of a disturbing court case about the death of an adopted child with Joel Steinberg, and Hedda’s testimony about being the victim of domestic violence.
At about 11, Paulette’s parents began to let boys take her to the movies, with them along, and one of her earliest “dates” was with a classmate named Barry (the same Barry she would run into years later at the BBDO advertising agency).
When she turned 12, things changed as Paulette transferred to a junior high school in Mamaroneck, where the Coopers had moved, and her father, Ted, started his own business. He split away from the company that had taught him the gem business, with Stella’s brothers, and founded his own firm. Stella started going to the office to work as a bookkeeper, and Paulette was home much of the time with her grandmother, who could be difficult.
Paulette was already feeling isolated at the new school, where many of the kids had known each other from feeder elementary schools. At home she felt isolated as well. But she adapted, turning always to her books. She read so avidly, she even spent hours reading the dictionary.
To her parents’ dismay, she didn’t have any interest in reading Hebrew. She wouldn’t sit still for religious training, and she refused to be bat mitzvahed. It wasn’t a religious rebellion, she just had no interest.
By 15, she was devouring books on many different subjects, but she worried that she had fallen into the wrong crowd at high school and she was developing typical frustrations about her parents which she poured into a jour
nal. And it was then that she ran into Martin Gardner’s book containing a chapter tearing apart the ideas of a man named L. Ron Hubbard.
She had no idea then, of course, how much Hubbard would become a part of her life years later.
In the summer of 1960, as she turned 18, Paulette made her first trip to Belgium on a cruise with her parents. She saw her sister Suzy for the first time since she had been adopted. At her parents’ insistence, she had been corresponding with Suzy since she had arrived in the United States. The two exchanged birthday gifts – one of which was a copy of Crime and Punishment that Paulette received which played a role in her Wellesley interview.
She met other living relatives on the trip, and also was shown for the first time a photograph of Chaim and Ruchla Bucholc – her biological parents killed at Auschwitz. She didn’t want her adoptive parents, Ted and Stella, to know it, but seeing that photo devastated her. For the first time, they became real to her. And so did their deaths – her mother’s at only 31 especially haunted her. She could see her own face in theirs. Mostly that of her father’s – Suzy looked more like their mother.
Her mother’s sad eyes disturbed her, and stayed with her on the trip. She began to wonder about small things – had her mother liked ice cream? The color blue?
Paulette wanted to ask such questions of her father’s remaining relatives in Belgium – including the aunt who had kept her in the orphanages for two years after adopting Suzy – but when she was with them the questions stuck in her throat. In some ways, she didn’t want to know anything about her mother. Knowing more about how she had lived only made the thought of how she died even worse.
While they were there, the Coopers were also told that an ailing, older man had asked to see Paulette. It was Robert De Foy, the former Belgian official who had helped many Jewish children escape Nazi annihilation. Paulette had no way of knowing him, and she was slightly uncomfortable as her parents thanked the elderly man, who sat outside in the sun on a folding chair in his pajamas. He wanted Paulette to sit on his lap, perhaps as she had as an infant. He looked slightly ridiculous, with a medal or two from the war pinned to his pajamas, and Paulette was relieved when they said their goodbyes.