Catholic University of Louvain
Faculty of Theology
Rescuer: Julia Schuyten Sluys
Survivor: Sylvieke Reichman
Perpetrator: Louis Debra
Paper Judaism
by
Jan MAES
PROF. DR. GEORGE WILKES
2007
Preface
The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No,
but in the knowledge and the beginning
from which the Yes and the No arise.
Karl Barth
This paper is the third and final part of a trilogy about one episode in the Shoa or Holocaust I started to write in 2005. I have a master degree in Modern History and a bachelor degree in Religious Sciences. I decided, after being a teacher of religion for almost twenty years, to get my master degree in Religious Sciences at the Catholic University of Louvain. The first part of the trilogy was a paper I wrote for Professor Didier Pollefeyt. The goal was to create an electronic paper about the Holocaust for the use in courses of Catholic religion in secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. The starting point was a moving article titled “At least Sylvieke”. It was an interview with Julia Schuyten, a cousin of my father-in-law, who turned out to have been a rescuer of Jews during WWII. The second interesting source of information was her grandfather’s war diary – the man who also is my children’s great-great-grandfather, Médard Schuyten. The diary was published in 1945.
I’d never thought that the extensive original historical research that followed over the last three years would ultimately lead to the discovery of a formerly never identified nor studied informal network of Flemish Protestant rescuers, to the finding of Sylvie Reichman, the Jewish girl mentioned in the interview of Julia Schuyten, to her marvellous reunion with the children of the people who had rescued her, to the recognition of Henri Rooze and Truus Van Buuren as “Righteous Gentiles” by Yad Vashem and to a lot of other discoveries due to the information from contacts I made in Belgium, Holland, the United States and Israel.
The second part, which I wrote last year was an extensive double paper for Professors Lieve Gevers and Johan Verstraeten, primarily focusing on the historical reconstruction of the different stories of bystanders, victims and perpetrators, and especially on the Protestant network of rescuers. But a lot of historical research still remained undone. In 2006-2007 Professor George Wilkes of Cambridge University was invited by the Catholic University of Louvain as guest professor for the course Judaism. He was so kind as to allow me to write a paper for his course, so I could finish my research and write a third part of what became a trilogy, this time encompassing comments on the use of ideas of free will and determination in the choices and experiences of the victims, perpetrators and bystanders I’d studied.
This focus required a lot of new historical investigating, especially into the perpetrators and into the working of the department of the Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst (Sipo-SD) in Antwerp. It also necessitated a lot of secondary literature concerning the perspectives on bystander-perpetrator-victim discussions.
I must say that I’m primarily an historian and a religious scientist and not a psychologist nor a sociologist. This is the reason that I will try to analyze the vast amount of historical and archival material I’ve collected in these years, to comment on the relationship between notions of peacetime and wartime in thinking about topics like necessity, chance, life and death… I don’t intend to get involved with psychological or sociological interpretations, although I will mention as much relevant historical information as possible for such an analysis. This is because I’m convinced that in many cases the moral choices people make – if it is a free choice at all – are the result of the interaction of the personal character, formed by the individual (neuro)biology (genetics, architecture and functioning of the brain…) and experiences in the early childhood, of the circumstances in which people find themselves and of the individual’s behaviour itself. Yehuda Bauer wrote: “A historian, in my estimation, has to do two things, especially when dealing with a subject as this: one, research and analyze; and two, remember that there is a story to be told, a story that relates to people’s lives. So a real historian is also a person who tells (true) stories.”
This is why a part of the paper will be presented as a historical narrative. Because this analysis is based on events in times long past, we were confronted with the major problem that nearly all protagonists have passed away in the mean time and that, unfortunately, we can no longer directly ask additional information from the ones involved themselves. This was a problem that was not so prominent in the seventies and eighties, the time that scholars such as social psychologist Eva Fogelman, sociologist Samuel Oliner and educator Pearl Oliner did their research. Now we are obliged to base our analysis mainly on a large variety of written documents and on the comments of the descendants of rescuers and victims. Until today we’ve been unable to find descendants of the perpetrators. Most of them moved away after the war.
I wish to thank: Dora and Marnix Sluys for the documents and information about their parents; Edith Hönig, the only adult involved at that time and still alive today, for her support, her willingness to put her dramatic story down on paper and for the pictures; Sylvie Reichman Lednicer for her support; Joop, Han, Jaap, Lies and Frank Rooze for the pictures and information about their parents and about the hidden Jews, Wim Schuyten for the information about his parents; Margaret Hickman-Schuyten for the important letters of her parents; Laurence Schram and Ilse Marquenie of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Malines, François Haverals of the Circle of the Geography and History of Boechout; Bruno Gastmans of the Circle of Geopgraphy and History of Mortsel; historian Lieven Saerens of CEGESOMA (Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society) for his valuable information; Patricia Marcovici and Paula Reichman-Marcovici for the pictures of members of the Reichman family and Greet Rooze for the pictures of several Protestants involved in the informal network; archivist Louis-Philippe Arnhem of the Archives of the Office of Strangers; Jacques Funkleder of the Hidden Child; Guy Hanuse of the Archives of the Office of the Advocate-General with the Military Court of Appeals; Michlean Amir of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; Sabine Grynberg of the Embassy of Israel in Brussels for their friendly and helpful assistance; the professors Didier Pollefeyt, Lieven Gevers, Johan Verstraeten en George Wilkes for allowing me to work on this project; Burton Sanders, André Frans, Annick Dingenen and Lisa Lednicer for proofreading parts of the English text; my wife Ingrid and my children Hans, Leen and Tom for the time they missed me, being physically or mentally occupied by the research, telephoning, e-mailing, reading, thinking and writing at my desk.
Jan Maes
Mai 2007
Introduction
“In-depth studies of perpetrators, victims, and rescuers have provided a wealth of pertinent and detailed information that can be used to illustrate the moral problems that people encountered and identify the principle difficulties in trying to make assessments of moral responsibility.”
David H. Jones (5)
To choose or not to choose, that was the daily question for bystanders, victims and perpetrators during the period of the persecution of the Jews in the Second World War. This study, based on original documents and later testimonies, deals with the moral problems of a group of protestant helpers and rescuers, Jewish victims, German and especially Flemish perpetrators in the surroundings of Antwerp (and Louvain). Did they have a choice? Could they have acted another way? Was it the circumstances that forced them to act as they did? Was it their personality that can explain what they did? Or was it their choices and behaviour that led them from one thing to another? Or was it the interaction of these decisive factors? Is it possible and is it right to judge people about their moral responsibility in the Holocaust more than sixty years after the facts? Do we have sufficient substantive material to pass such a judgment?
What makes this paper so special? The help and rescue of Jews by Protestants in the surroundings of Antwerp (and Louvain) has never been the subject of a publication before, except for the interview with Julia Schuyten I have mentioned before (De Volder & Wouters: 120-126). With this study we are also writing a piece of history.
Secondly, this paper is not a study based on (secondary) literature – although we read a lot of secondary literature – but the result of new research. That is why in our paper we will focus on information unrevealed so far. The extensive bibliography gives a good impression of the sources of information we’ve used. Some of these sources are unique and of important historical value.
To get an idea of the individual choices people made (or did not make) at that time, it was absolutely essential to collect as much relevant factual information as we could. It is rather exceptional that we could find so much material about nearly all the individuals named in the story by Julia Schuyten. We managed to collect a lot of interesting information concerning the (lack of) freedom of choice. We tried to find an answer to the question how many decisions and experiences were influenced by the perceptions of the reality of wartime; and how much or how little peacetime attitudes had changed with wartime. It is obvious that the answer to these questions can only be given within the framework of a historical narrative, a reconstruction based on pieces of information found in a vast amount of contemporary documents and on additional information from later testimonies of the several protagonists and their descendants. The findings and conclusions of this big puzzle will always be provisional, because of the absence of pieces of information, the partiality of the sources of information, the differences in trustworthiness of the sources, the differences in reliability of the memories… Nevertheless I’m convinced that we still can learn a lot from the study of the disappearance of 10.000 to 15.000 people in only a few weeks’ time during the late summer of 1942, which historian Rudi Van Doorslaer called: “Unparalleled in Belgian History”.
Our narrative starts with the central story by Julia Schuyten, because most of the protagonists appear in it. We completed the initial story with crucial additional information and we corrected the errors Julia made telling her story fifty years after the facts. Then we analysed the relevant information concerning the individual choices and moral responsibility of the helpers and rescuers, followed by a similar analysis of the choices and responsibility of the victims, and finally those of the perpetrators involved. Because the lifelines of these individuals cross each other, overlaps, flash forwards and flashbacks in telling the story are inevitable.
To improve the reading process, we reduced the number of pictures and decided to replace the hundreds of footnotes with references in an extensive bibliography at the end.
1. Julia Schuyten Sluys*, The war years (From January 1941 until July 17, 1944)
Julia Schuyten’s account of the events was put in fairly simple terms and style, with frequent repetitions or inefficient wording. That’s why the English text may sound a bit elementary in places.
In 1941 [or more likely in the spring of 1942], some friends of ours of the protestant church in Bexstraat [Antwerp] asked if we had any job for a Jewish boy [named Gottfried Finkel*].
The Jews who had a business had to close it, and consequently their employees, who were predominantly Jews, lost their jobs too and no longer had a way to earn a living.
Klaas [Sluys*, Julia’s husband] had a business [of perfumed oils and flavourings] with 12 to 14 employees. [The business was going well.] Klaas invited the young man and they agreed that the boy would work at night and leave in the morning [although a German act dated 29th August 1941 prohibited Jews from leaving their homes between eight a clock in the evening until seven a clock in the morning]. He wore the yellow Jew Star of David [compulsory as of May 7 1942] and therefore should not be seen by the other employees of Klaas. After a few months [starting July 22 1942] the situation for the Jews grew worse. They were picked up in their homes and made ready for transport to Germany [correction: to Auschwitz in Poland]. Our Finkel requested help for his blind mother [Laura Einig*], his father [Markus*] and his sister [Selma*], because they too were afraid to be put on transport. What ought we to do?
Grandma and grandpa [Margriet Oudheusden* and Henri Schuyten*] took them [Gottfried Finkel’s parents] in. That cost them a lot of money, as they had no ration cards [for the Jews] .
Around the same time Klaas got a visit from [Sigmund Hönig*] a Dutch businessman and a customer of his, who was in distress. There was the father [Sigmund Hönig], the mother [Rosa Gross*], two daughters [Edith* and Lily*], an aunt [Anna Hönig*] and her adult son [correction: Heinz Schindler* was not Anna Hönig’s son]. [Edith, Lily and Heinz Schindler fled from Amsterdam to France on June 27 1942, because the younger ones were called up by the Germans for the so called labour camps. Edith and Lily got the company of one uncle and two aunts, Philip Landau and Thea Gross; and Anna Hönig Kron, and Heinz got the company of his parents, Samuel Schindler and Kamille Körner]. These people had fled to France and wanted to get to Spain [correction: to pass the demarcation line with Vichy-France in order to get to Switzerland]. But in France they [Philip and Thea, and Samuel and Kamille] fell into the hands of the Gestapo (or the German police). They sought refuge in the woods but the aunt’s [Thea] husband [Philip] was caught. [Correction: Thea, Samuel and Kamille were also caught. None of them returned.] The others [Edith, Lily, Heinz and Anna, who were walking a little bit behind the first group] could escape, but they were so frightened that they returned to Belgium and [on August 15 1942] came to us. What ought we to do?
We had a big house with many rooms and we housed these people on the upper floor. Temporarily, said Klaas, because he said that our house was not safe because of the business. The employees should know nothing about it.
He made an arrangement with the businessman, named Mr. Hönig. He would find a [hiding] place for them, but in return he [Mr. Hönig] was to contribute money for the other Jewish family [the Finkels], which could no longer stay with grandfather and grandmother [Henri and Margriet Schuyten], as they lived too close to other people. From this point [after October 19 1942] René [Schuyten*, Julia’s brother] worked together with Klaas to look very carefully for [protestant] people who wanted to rent out an apartment to Jews. A high price was paid for this, because it was strongly forbidden to house Jews. Klaas used a great deal of his own fortune to pay for the food of the Jews or for the rent they had to pay, when they ran out of resources. Sigmund Hönig accepted his help, but paid back this big loan in the first year after the war. [John Polderman, René Schuyten’s best friend, and his wife Lea hid Sigmund Hönig and his wife Rosa for a brief period between August 10 and November 20 1942, but it is not clear how much Polderman was paid for it by Hönig, and whether or not the couple hid them for money. From November 20 1942 Sigmund Hönig, his wife (and daughter Lily?) were hidden by René Schuyten and Nelly Opstelten*, probably until on January 31 1943. They paid 12,000 Bfr. a month (or € 7,450 today) for the three of them. Charles Hendrickx* and Yvonne Noë, who asked 150 Bfr. per person per day (or about € 100 today), hid a Dutch woman, called Karin Bremer; her two year-old daughter, Sophia Bremer; Jonas Polak; and Rosalie Berlstein and her husband, Igo Gross*, who was Sigmund Hönig’s brother-in-law. Igo Gross arrived just a few days before the raid by the infamous Flemish SD-member, Louis-Joseph Debra* and a German on March 13 1943. Jonas Polak had trusted one Gustaaf De Schutter and had deposited some possessions with him, but that man was also acquainted with Debra and, for obvious reasons, betrayed Jonas Polak. The German thought that Rosalie Berlstein was not Jewish because she was blond, and Debra thought that the little Sophia Bremer was a child of Charles Hendrickx. Sophia Bremer, Jonas Polak and Igo Gross were arrested. Charles Hendrickx could escape and his wife, Yvonne Noë, was able to warn Door Hendrickx*, her father-in-law, who also, for money, hid the families Hönig and Finkel and Heinz Schindler. (After the arrest of Klaas on January 31 1943, it was too dangerous for Hönig and his wife (and daughter) to stay with René Schuyten, Klaas’s brother-in-law, and so René helped them to find a safer place to hide, namely with Door Hendrickx and Philomena Coene.) Thanks to Yvonne Noë’s warning of Door Hendrickx, the ten Jews could escape in time. On March 15 Louis Debra [Dolmetscher (interpreter/driver)] and the very brutal Jew hunter Felix Lauterborn* [Dolmetscher Ostministerium], two Flemish members of the Gestapo in Antwerp, came back and waited for Charles, who, however, didn’t show up. They took the little girl, Karin Bremer, with them. On March 17 Charles turned himself in, because Debra and Lauterborn had threatened to turn in his wife instead. The same day Debra and Lauterborn entered Door Hendrickx’s house of, but didn’t find anything. On March 19 they returned to Door Hendrickx’s house, and arrested him and his wife, Philomena Coene. At that time their youngest adolescent son, Eduard, was not at home, but he had found refuge with René Schuyten and his wife Nelly. We know for certain that Karin Bremer, Charles Hendrickx, Jonas Polak, Igo Gross, Door Hendrickx and his wife Philomena were all interrogated at the headquarters of the Sipo-SD by the Judenreferent (the head of the Antwerp Judenabteilung, Abteilung III), the extremely brutal Kriminaloberassistent SS-Oberscharführer Erich Holm; interpreter Debra; Lauterborn; Emiel Jansssens and a fair-haired man. Some of them were questioned more than once, and during this interrogation they were beaten up by Holm. None of them betrayed neither the Hönig and Finkel families nor Heinz Schindler. On September 15 1943 Door was sentenced to one year by the German Kriegsgericht, and on March 27 1943 his son Charles to ten months for the housing of Jews. On November 22 1943 they were sent to France to work at the construction of the Atlantic Wall (Organisation Todt), but on December 2 1943 they managed to escape, came back to Belgium and hid at their place of birth, Geel, until the day of liberation. Philomena Coenen was released from the prison in Antwerp on September 3 1943. April 19 1943 Karin and Sophia Bremer, Jonas Polak and Igo Gross were put on transport with Judentransport XX to Auschwitz. Karin and Sophia Bremer never returned. Jonas Polak survived Auschwitz. Igo Gross jumped out of the train and managed to rejoin his wife, the Hönig and Finkel families and Heinz Schindler who, with the help of a Jewish dentist in Brussels, named Otto Hutterer, who was related to an aunt of Heinz Schindler, Julia Felderbaum Herzfeld, found an apartment in St. Josse, near Brussels, where they stayed from April 8 1943 until the liberation of Brussels on September 3 1944. They all survived the war.]
So Finkel and his family and Hönig and his family ended up together in Brussels. In the meantime we had again a new family in Withof (the name of our house), a mother [Myriam Reichman Grosz] with three youngsters, girls [Annie and Paula Grosz] aged 14 and 16 years [correction: aged 13 and 17 years] and a boy [Alexander Grosz] 18 years old [correction: 14 years] (The father [Zoltan Grosz] was taken to Germany [correction: to Auschwitz on September 4 1942 with Judentransport IX]).
We also took up a little girl [Sylvie(ke) Reichman] in our family, three years old, whose parents were deported. [Benoit Reichman and Itta Grunspan, together with three of his brothers had been deported to Auschwitz on September 15 1942 with Judentransport X. None of them survived.] For her grandmother [Dobe Thaler Grunspan, whose husband Joel Grunspan was arrested together with his daughter Sarah and her husband, Eisig Safir, and sent to Auschwitz on October 10 1942 with Judentransport XII. Only Eisig survived Auschwitz.] we found a hiding place in Hove (a town next to Boechout). This gave me the opportunity to bring Sylvieke (that was the little one’s name) to her grandmother for half a day and collect her later on (by bike).
My sister Jeanne [Schuyten] was a nurse [at the Stuivenberg hospital] in Antwerp. There they had a [Polish] Jew [Hersz Nadel, who after a detention at Dachau, had fled Germany with his family on March 7 1939. They tried to emigrate to the United States, but they failed because they needed official documents from the Polish government, but because Nadel had left Poland for Berlin more than twenty years earlier, they considered him no longer to be a Polish citizen.], whose family [his wife Estera Neumann and their youngest son Manfred] had been taken to Germany [correction: Auschwitz on August 18 1942 with Judentransport IV. Their eldest son, Max Nadel, survived the war, married and went to Israel.]. He was in good health for quite some time, nevertheless the doctor, together with the nurses, tried to report him “ill” as long as possible, because he didn’t have anywhere to go. [Sick Jews were only allowed for the shortest time possible in a closed ward of the Antwerp Saint Erasmus hospital, where from time to time the Jews who were well enough were selected to be deported.] But this could not last, so Jeanne knew no other solution than to bring this man to us. That was in the middle of January 1943.
On January 31 [1943], in the middle of the night the Germans [correction: only one German and six Flemish members of the Gestapo] invaded our house. [They had been tipped off by an anonymous informant that Klaas listened to the English radio and that he printed and distributed illegal pamphlets.] With ten or eight blackshirts (the name we used for the collaborators, men who worked with the Germans) [correction: eight men: The German Gestapo man, SS-Scharführer Conrad Kaeding (Sachbearbeiter leading Abteilung IV C: Auskünfte, Schutzhaft, Presse und Schrifttum, Emigranten), was in charge and he was accompanied by seven Flemish Gestapo members: brutal Louis Debra (Dolmetscher), Jan Schuermans (Hilffspolizeibeamte and Dolmetscher in Abteilung IV D2: Widerstand, Geiseln, Sühneleistungen, Ausweisungen, Abschiebungen, Schutzdienst), Jan Pitz (SS-Staffelmann & Dolmetscher, leader of the Abteilung IV A1: Gegner und Abwehr: Kommunismus, Marxismus Feindpropaganda), Emile “Willy “Wyndaele (Hilffspolizeibeamte, head of the Ermittlungsdienst and working together with Abteilung IV A) and two others.]; the [with the Germans collaborating V.N.V. war] mayor [Staf Van Sintjan] of the town [of Boechout] was among them. [Because they couldn’t find Klaas Sluys’s house, Kaeding, Debra and Schuermans decided to drive to the mayor’s house in order to make him show Withof.] They overran the whole house and the factory. They turned on the radio and it was tuned in to the B.B.C. - the English broadcasting station. It was strongly forbidden to listen to it. All the children, Dora - aged 4, Jan - aged not yet 3, and Herman - aged almost 2, and Sylvieke - aged 3, slept and didn't wake up. Also because I had reminded them to be quiet because of the [sleeping] children. (It is a wonder [that they didn’t wake up], because the Germans were running in their heavy boots all through the house!) When one of the men asked me [correction: Klaas] how many children I [correction: he] had in my [correction: his] household, I [quickly] said four. I myself I had only three, but if [Klaas or] I would have said that, they would have taken Sylvieke with them. I had a maid servant [Leonie Oostvogels], and they asked her the same question and she too replied that we had four children. Luckily enough Sylvieke, with her curley black hair, was deep under the blankets and slept.
One of the men said: ‘You are lucky to have so many children, otherwise we would have taken you with us as well.”
When it was clear that they were going to take Klaas and the five Jewish people with them, into the kitchen I quickly made a packed lunch with slices of bread for each of them for the next morning. One of the Germans asked in disdain, "Für die Juden?", and I answered, “Yes, for these poor people.”
They left and afterwards I found out that Klaas and the Jewish man [Nadel] had been taken to the prison of Antwerp, in Begijnenstraat, and that the woman with her children had been transferred to Malines, where many rounded-up Jews were gathered before being deported to Germany [correction: Auschwitz]. [April 19 1943 Myriam Reichman Grosz; her three children, Paula, Alexander and Annie; and Hersz Nadel were put on Judentransport XX to Auschwitz were they arrived April 22. None of them survived.] And we were left behind! It was a real sad situation: I was 27 years old and had four little children aged 1½ up to 4.
The first month I thought that Klaas would be released very soon: he had not done anything wrong! But the Germans thought otherwise and on April 1 1943, Klaas was sentenced to two years of hard labour by [judge Baudisch of] the Kriegsgericht [wegen Herstellung und Verbreitung von Flugschriften, Abhörens nichtdeutscher Sender und Verbotener Berherbergung von Juden]. I had gone to the trial, thinking that he would soon be released. They brought him into the courtroom with his hands cuffed. I wasn’t allowed to go into the courtroom, so I stayed outside and waited. All the German judges in full dress went in. I thought: “Well, well, now they think: ‘We have him in our power’, but how mistaken they were. Klaas is a child of God and He will decide what will happen to him”. But the outcome was hard. The sentence was two years of hard labour. Two years! That looks terribly long when one is at the beginning and I knew: then he’ll go to Germany. I ran downstairs and waited near the lift and when they came out I fell around his neck, but his guards, two Germans, pulled me away. But I grasped his arm and held it tight and thus we left the building. I didn't mind there being people staring at us, and I walked through the streets with him; Huidevettersstraat and then back to prison. Time and again the two guards tried to pull me away but I didn’t let it happen. When the gate and the prison doors closed behind him, this was so terrible. My best friend, Dora Sme[e]kens [now Dora Smeekens Quittelier] lived a few streets away. I went there and together we wept with grief.
Then I had to go home alone, and that was so strange, it looked as though I was completely alone in the world. All the people I met in the street didn't know anything about what was going on in my heart. At home I couldn’t but cry a lot, and my parents too were in deep distress.
On April 5, there was a terrible bombing of Mortsel [a town between Antwerp and Boechout]. It was a bright sunny day in spring. I was shuffling along in front of the gate of the prison of Begijnenstraat with food for Klaas when the American bombers flew low over the city of Antwerp and dropped their bombs on Mortsel.
There was a factory of airplane parts [Frontreperaturbetrieb ERLA VII, the factory where also German planes were repaired]. It was terrible! All the neighbouring houses and several schools were on fire. 2800 dead and numerous wounded persons [correction: 936 dead, among them 200 children; 1,342 wounded, 800 destroyed or badly damaged houses], there were also many children and inhabitants of Boechout among the victims.
It was very quiet that night at Boechout and we heard people crying in the streets. A neighbourhood baker rode through Kroonstraat with his 10-year-old daughter dead in a basket on his bicycle. Anybody who saw them was crying. This happened four days after Klaas' condemnation. I was very quiet, but my own sorrow lessened when I saw all the mourning and anguish around me. Then I thought: ‘My husband is still alive. He may be in prison but he lives.’ That made it much easier for me to bear. My husband might return some day. My parents came to live with me, so that I didn’t have to stay alone with my children. That was a great privilege.
And fortunately René continued to take care of the Jews for whom we were responsible. He visited them, tried to get hold of ration cards and acted as a go-between for the Jews and their landlord.
At her office my sister, who was a head nurse at the Stuivenberg hospital, heard a conversation between some visitors and a sick person. She heard them say that Mister Sluys had been arrested in Boechout for hiding Jews in his house and they added: “They still have a Jewish girl in their house they didn’t take with them.” Jeanne called me and said: “Make sure to find another place to hide for Sylvieke, or else they may come and take away the little one.” In Louvain [correction Korbeek-Lo, near Louvain] happened to live one Rooze family. They had written before that if we needed a hiding place for somebody to go underground and for whom we could not find a place, they were prepared to help (They were fine Christian people.) [Henri Rooze and Truus van Buuren were just like Henri Schuyten and Margriet Oudheusden, Klaas and Julia, René and Nelly, Jeanne Schuyten, John Polderman and his wife Lea, Door Hendrickx and Philomena Coenen, Charles Hendrickx and Yvonnne Noë, Protestants of the “Reformed Churches in the Netherlands”, a small religious minority in a predominantly Catholic Flanders.]
Antoine Rooze [also a Protestant], a nephew of theirs and a friend of ours, who lived near us, took Sylvieke to Louvain [correction: Korbeek-Lo], and there she was safe. After the war, Sylvieke still had her grandmother, two cousins [Renée and Rose Safir] who had been hidden in a boarding-school; also their father [Eisig Safir] was still alive. They went to America after the war. [Correction: Only Sylvieke and her grandmother, Dobe Thaler, emigrated to the United States. Sylvieke would be adopted by her aunt and uncle, Charlotte Grunspan and Leon Lachter, who had already emigrated from Belgium to the United States in 1938. Dobe Thaler died in 1948. Eisig Safir stayed in Belgium with his two daughters. Sylvieke lost her parents, three of her grandparents, seven uncles and seven aunts, eight nephews and cousins, and her nurse-maid in the Shoa. One aunt and her three children survived because they were hidden in Wallonia; one uncle, an aunt and their son had fled in time and managed to survive the war in France taking a false identity; one cousin survived miraculously in Poland. And one way or another one uncle, who was a bachelor, survived as well.]
Klaas stayed in Antwerp prison. [On February 24 1943 the Sipo-SD handed him over to the Feldkommandatur 520.] I could visit him every two weeks. I could bring him a packet of 3 kilos of food, smoking material and some underwear. Our visit was behind glass and we had to speak loudly to understand each other, so it was no place to tell secrets. It was the nicest day for me and I always looked forward to it. I made delicious white loaf of bread and toasted the slices so they weighed less, and so thus I could put more into the packet. Klaas stayed there for three months and then [on Mai 28 1943] he was transported to Brussels [to St. Gilles prison] and [on June 8] from there to Louvain prison. The administration was Belgian but under German control. The Belgians were laxer to prisoners who were there for political reasons. (In theory it was a prison for hardened criminals).
I was allowed to come to visit him more frequently and I could bring him much heavier parcels. There was also a catholic priest, who could walk in and out, and thus smuggled in a lot for the prisoners. Klaas wrote me: “You don’t have to send me any clothes anymore because I’m dressed from top to toe in fashionable prison garments.” He was sitting alone in a cell, which Klaas found hard to get used to, but later on he was glad to be by himself. It was nice to be able to read and write as much as he liked to. He went to classes to learn French and had to study. When they were walking in the inner court he could talk to his fellow prisoners very easily. One day he became ill. The doctor analysed his urine and there was albumen in it. This pointed to an infection of the kidneys. Klaas became very worried, because in his teens [from the age of fourteen until he was seventeen years old] he had already suffered [several times] from this dangerous disease so he had had to leave [at the age of seventeen] his birthplace because it was too damp for him there. Fortunately he was ill for only a week, but because of this there was a doctor’s report that said that Klaas had a kidney disease and that he could hardly bear his imprisonment. (This medical report was to become very important later on, because it remained with the director of the prison, and because of this and thanks to the intervention of friends and others who were in contact with the German judges, Klaas was eventually released six months early.) [There is a real chance that this intervention, via a lady who was on friendly terms with German officers, saved his life, because a lot of other people who hid Jews, were sent to Germany at the end of the war in Belgium and ended up in Buchenwald or Bergen Belsen. Quite a lot of them didn’t survive.] When a transport was ready to take the prisoners to Germany, at first Klaas could stay in Louvain because of his bad health condition. But two months later, at the end of September [on September 27 1943] all other political prisoners had to leave for Germany and this time Klaas was one of them. Of course it caused deep sorrow again. In his last letter from Louvain Klaas wrote to me:
[Leuven cel nr. 344 – September 22 1943
My dear little Jule,
For the time being, this will be the last letter you will get from me. A period in which we could testify of our love is being closed. I’m in grief that my letters can support you, although I know, that my letters grieve you instead of having brought support. But I know that even then there is a great deal of sweetness in all our sorrow…] A dark period is coming for both of us. But this period will not be long and it is only dark because the darkness precedes the beginning of a beautiful daybreak. A daybreak in which our most passionate ideals will be fulfilled.
And never is the night so dark, because there is still the Morningstar that speaks of God's loyal care and help wherever we go or stay. With you and with the children at Boechout, with me, wherever I may be. Little Jule, it is not people who send me away, although they think so. It is God himself who calls me to a place I do not know. And I ought to follow. I can’t but follow. Where would I go without Him? He knows what is good for us. He is holding the hands of the both of us and he leads us along the road. He wants what is good, what is safe, what leads to salvation. Should I in my foolishness choose another way? Only with Him are we safe and secure. And what counts for me, it equally does for you, my beloved, and for the children God gave us. In His care you are a thousand times more secure than with me, that is without Him. I know, that – if we were allowed to choose - we in our foolishness and weakness, we would prefer to choose each other and let Him wait. But God loves us so much that he doesn't let us choose, and that He does what He knows is best for us. And He also knows that during our earthly life we can't miss each other. And for that reason in His own time He will reunite us. Who knows how quickly? With Him nothing is impossible. He alone is the Lord and Master who rules the nations of the world and when He speaks, there is nobody to answer. Let us live, in that belief and trust, little Jule: then our cross won’t be difficult to bear."
He stayed in Germany for nine months, the first five of them in Kassel, but there they were bombed. The prison and the whole town centre were destroyed. The prisoners remained locked in. You may understand how frightened they were. Klaas told me later on that he was lying on the floor with his mattress on him; others were standing in the corner behind their mattresses and all were calling on God and there were prayers Ave Maria… over and over again. After the bombing, life in Kassel had become impossible, and for the prisoners too. They were taken to Nieder-Rode Schierheim. There they had to work in an airplane factory, twelve hours a day, sometimes at daytime, sometimes at night. It was a terrible time; heavy labour, little food, weakness and cold. But later on he told about this time, that God was so close to him that afterwards he sometimes longed for it to come back again and, and that he sang so much. There was so much noise in the factory, that he could sing as loudly as he liked, because of the noise nobody could hear him. God was nearby and his wife and children were on the other end and they were waiting for him.
Finally, in July 1944, he was released six months early. He was released on basis of the medical report (made up in Louvain prison). [On June 28 1944 he was transported from the prison camp of Rodgau to the prison of Antwerp to be released on July 13 1944.] Very thin and weak, but not ill. He weighed 58 kilos, whereas his weight before was 78 kilos.
Home again! Oh, what a lovely and unforgettable time. ‘God, how good You are!’
2. The historical context
Before analysing the information from thousands of pages of documents and testimonies concerning the individual choices and moral responsibility of the helpers and rescuers, the victims and the perpetrators we have studied, we need to know which elements of information are important or may be relevant for such an analysis. We got valuable hints from books and articles of scholars of different backgrounds: psychologists, sociologists, historians (see bibliography). In this secondary literature we searched for elements being linked with free will and determination, to the degree decisions and experiences were influenced by the perception of wartime reality; and to how much or how little peacetime attitudes had changed during wartime. In the next chapters we’ll compare and confront these “touchstones” with the information we collected during our extended research. We’ll try to analyze while narrating, to find the elements of the answers beyond the facts.
“The answer to the question, where was humanity, lies firstly in careful historical study of the period of the shoah.” (Blumenthal: 9) Agreeing with the German historian, Karin Orth, in her book, Die Konzenstrationslager-SS, the historian should not go into to all kinds of psychological and other speculations, but he should only describe the concrete deeds of these figures, interpreted within the historical context. “Context is crucial.” (Bloxham & Kushner: 178) As Fogelman admits: “A [brief] historical overview of this particular period provides the necessary background for a true appreciation of the deed of the rescuers.” (Fogelman, 1994: 21) “Description and analysis… are explanation. Study helps us to understand human behaviour. [Gathering data and solid, fact-oriented historical] analysis helps us grasp what has happened. Study and analysis, however, do not resolve the question of responsibility.” (Blumenthal: 23)
“Any event is the result of the interaction of an infinite number of causal chains. A distinction can be made between marginal influences and more central ones, and one of the main tasks of the historian, if not the main one, is to try and make that distinction. But the very fact that the number of causal chains is infinite, and that they interact and constantly change positions – old Heraklitos was right – means that there are choices; and it is people who make the choices. The view that if we knew all the causes, we could know all the results is off the mark, for there is not even a theoretical possibility of knowing an infinite number of causes. Anything could have happened differently from the way it did… Beyond some point, of course, other options and choices are shut out. In 1941, given complete German control over most of Europe, the weakness of the Allies, and the increasing radicalization of German anti-Jewish policies, the Holocaust of the Jewish people could not have been avoided by the West or by anyone else.” (Bauer: 133)
First we diagnosed that much of the literature concerning perpetrators, victims and bystanders is focused primarily on the atrocities, mass executions in villages, ghettos and extermination camps in Poland and in the former Soviet Union. However the situation in the Western countries occupied by the Germans was quite different.
In May 1940 German troops took over Belgium. At that time René Schuyten had been mobilized and as a Belgian soldier he had to fight the Germans. In his war diary we can read what it meant to experience an invasion of an aggressive foreign power by brute military force, that ordinary soldiers of a small and badly equipped Belgian army tried to hold back and slow down as long as possible. Soldiers like René fought like lions to defend their homeland against the aggressor. This was the first act of resistance. The German campaign started on May 10 1940 and lasted until May 28, the date on which the Belgian army ceased fire and capitulated.
“Suddenly some German soldiers jump out from behind the trees and start crossing the road. I shoot on first sight. Men are falling over each other. Most of them are dead, some others try to crawl away. I shoot and shoot… The body count increases and so does the sound of grenades and of our own machine gun. Now and then we can hear the wounded crying and screaming. We just keep shooting as though we were machines. We were no longer humans. How many bombs have fallen? How many German soldiers I shot I don’t know. The Germans are still at the tree line. We shoot at them, they fall and they keep sending new soldiers… Our retreat is a chaos. Several regiments cross through each other. The road is blocked by cars and soldiers. It is hopeless. We know the game is lost. The entire night we are disturbed by aircraft. Parachutists shoot at us from all directions. We slowly move on…
We are behind the Leie… There isn’t much courage left. We are demoralized. We are dead beaten. How long has it been since we slept? I can’t remember anymore. About five days I think. Now we have to dig a new trench. We are also very hungry. Now out of originally some 200 men in our company, 65 now are left. Our commander is a lieutenant of the 6th. He can’t provide us with any food. However, we are staying at a chicken farm, and most of the chickens die in our hands. We cook them and then, more or less well done, we eat them. It helps the moral. That afternoon the major asks for a volunteer, but nobody says anything except for Landau [a Jewish countrymen and a friend of René] and myself. We tell the rest that they are cowards. Everybody talks about surrender. Some men are selected to go on patrol. They go, by boat, to the other side of the canal. The moment they arrive there they put up a white flag and surrender. We are ordered to shoot at them but we refuse.
At last, Landau and I volunteer…
Now we have 48 men left: a lieutenant, an adjutant (who surrenders the same day), three corporals, three sergeants and 41 soldiers. That’s all that is left of the 250 we started with. At least 50-55 of them are dead, 50 were wounded, about the others we know nothing. They may be captured, dead, wounded or lost. We don’t know. Landau and I are the only ones who prefer to fight rather than surrender. We ask ourselves what will become of Belgium if the war is lost…”
Under German occupation, Belgium got a Militärverwaltung. This is one of the reasons why the SS was not so strong and so influential as in occupied countries like Holland with a Zivilverwaltung. “Many were career army officers and not necessarily devoted to Hitler or particularly in tune with his anti-Semitic ideology.” (Fogelman, 1994: 32) In general, German persecution of the Jews in Western Europe evolved more subtly and gradually than in Eastern Europe… and initially relied more on ostensibly legal discriminatory measures rather than brute force… The Nazis did not want to shock [Belgian] sensibilities and provoke widespread resistance. Instead, they gradually disenfranchised, impoverished, and isolated the Jews in a period when German domination over [Belgian] gentiles was still relatively tolerable, thereby dissociating the latter as much as possible from Jewish suffering… All these measures to identify Jews and exclude them from [Belgian] society expedited their subsequent concentration and expulsion from Belgium… Opposition to Jewish persecution by local elites could legitimate the cause of helping the Jews for undecided citizens… Guided by instructions from their government-in-exile, the highest ranking remaining Belgian officials refused to sanction anti-Jewish policies that violated the Hague Convention. This forced the Germans to rely on municipal mayors and the Jewish Council of Belgium (Association des Juifs de Belgique) to administer Nazi programs against the Jews. When neither of these groups were entirely cooperative, the Germans had to divert their own personnel to run the Final Solution there. (Oliner & Oliner: 16, 33, 19) The Nazi policy towards the Jews was implemented by degrees,” (Glover: 317) following a model that the Nazis first tried in Germany. “Looking retrospectively, the establishment of social space between Germans and German Jews was the key to minimising public discontent during the murder process.” (Boxham & Kushner: 116) The Nazis swiftly superimposed the model on some of the occupied countries. The blueprint was a slippery slope process of increasing discriminatory legislation through systematic identification; registration; exclusion from economic life and public appearance; isolation and concentration. By the summer of 1942 it all resulted in a condition of ‘social death,’ (Jones: 177) followed by their arrest, deportation and extermination. “‛Process’ is the key word here, because the Holocaust was a culmination of pre-existing developments, if not an inevitable one.” (Bloxham & Kushner: 61)
Starting at the end of July 1942 the Sipo-SD organised raids to round up Jews, with the assistance of German Feldgendarmen, three times with the full assistance of the Antwerp police, and (later on) with the help of Flemish SS-men and other members of collaborating groups like Rex (Saerens, 2000: 589-621). The Jews were brought to the military barracks Dossin in Sammellager Malines, from where as soon as possible, they were put on trains for deportation to Auschwitz, where most of them perished. This means that the killing of Jews by Germans or Belgians on Belgian territory was rather rare. One of the exceptions we found was the shooting of Chana Freifeld Karfiol on April 15 1943 at the moment of her arrest. The circumstances of the shooting still remain unknown. “Outside of Poland… respondents were less likely to observe brutal mistreatment of Jews directly. More often, they reported observing single instances of brutality toward Jews – a single shooting, a raid, or a transport or the special treatment of Jewish prisoners if they themselves were imprisoned or visited someone in prison.” (Oliner & Oliner: 119)
Here we have to say something about the specific historical events and conditions that affected the efforts to rescue Jews in the Antwerp region. People who hid Jews in Belgium were not executed, as Polish rescuers often were, but in the greater Antwerp region, the occupier sentenced them more heavily than elsewhere in Belgium. Rescuers in the Antwerp region were sentenced to hard labour in a prison or/and send to a concentration camp in Germany.
What were the policies and conditions imposed by Nazi Germany and the responses of local leaders and officials, and what made the situation in the region of Antwerp to be so different and far more dangerous for Jews and rescuers, compared with the other Belgian regions? In 1988 historian Maxime Steinberg spoke about the Antwerp specificity, not only because small groups of extreme-rightists had assisted in carrying out the persecution, but also because – more than elsewhere – the authorities and the representatives of the establishment are said to have collaborated with it (Saerens, 2000: 557-656); Saerens proved this in his doctoral dissertation and we found the testimony of a police officer who - in 1942 - was called before the mayor of Antwerp, Léon Delwaide, and ordered to render full assistance to Emile Wyndaele, member of the Sipo-SD and present at the raid on Klaas and Julia’s house at Boechout. He settled down at the office to control all the documents and activities of the personnel attached to the administration concerning the foreigners. In this “writing desk job” he collected valuable information about lots of Jews; this facilitated their later arrest. According to Lieven Saerens’s findings, the decisive factor for the Antwerp specificity was not the relatively very strong presence of deeply convinced national-socialists in the region of Antwerp. (More then 1000 Nazi informers were eager to report Jews in hiding to the Sipo-SD, and Boechout was even called “little Berlin” because of the great number of collaborators among the inhabitants). Nor was the main factor the great number of Antwerp Sipo-SD members, leading the persecution of Jews, and being members of anti-Jewish organisations already before the war. But the defining reason for the high rate of effectively deported was not these fanatics, but the indifference of the bystanders and more precisely of those responsible for the policy.
The foregoing is important because sociological and historical studies point out that most people have an inclination toward help, when referential groups of (religious, political…) authorities whose norms one shares, ask for it. In contrast to Brussels for example, the Antwerp authorities not only cooperated with the Germans in the anti-Jewish measures, but in fact collaborated with them. The mayor of Antwerp never condemned the raids and deportations openly and principally, on the contrary. And, unfortunately neither did the Belgian cardinal Van Roey, the religious authority at that time. Only one out of eight priests living in Greater Antwerp actively helped Jews. In Greater Brussels one in two did. But the number of indifferent bystanders in Antwerp was also terribly high. “In the Antwerp region the Germans could more or less do as they liked.” (Saerens, 2000, 747) As a consequence, in Antwerp 65% of the Jewish population got deported. Yet, in Brussels this was the case for “only” 37% of them (Saerens, 2000, 744-750, 727, 730, 731) knowing that in Belgium in total less than 45% of the Jews were deported.
On October 28 1939, when he was 74 years old, Médard Schuyten, grandfather of the helpers and rescuers Julia, René and Jeanne, started writing a detailed war diary, which was published in March 1945. Even though he, being a Protestant and a seemingly well informed intellectual, was not representative of the rest of the Antwerp population, this war diary proves that for the people living in Antwerp, it was impossible not to know what was happening to the Jews. In a few weeks’ time 10.000 to 15.000 Jews were rounded up in Antwerp. “Even if one looked away, asked no questions, and refrained from talk in public, a dull awareness remained. The disappearance of the Jews, or the appearance of their property, was a signal of what was happening. The event could not be stamped out completely.” (Hilberg: 195) In August 1942, when the round-ups began, he writes: “Round-ups of Jews to send them to the French coasts [Organisation Todt]. Women and children are being sent to Malines.” In September: “Now the Jews are rounded-up from the streets and deported in trucks, men and women. At night they are arrested in their beds. In the streets you don’t see them anymore. Now we understand what the purpose of the compulsory star of David was.”
In Belgium there were no Einsatzkommandos, no massive executions, only one concentration camp, Breendonk, but the outcome of the German policy remained the same: Nearly half of the Jews living in Belgium at the beginning of the war were finally killed in Auschwitz. Of the 25,124 Jews who had been deported from Belgium, most of them to Auschwitz, only 1,193 returned, and 240 died as members of the Belgian Resistance. (Saerens, 2000: 750, xxxvii; Van den Berghe: 288)
Historians such as Saerens have ruminated about unrealized possibilities in the situation that pertains before such final points of decision were reached – possibilities that might have been realised – but this as well as questions about how it could have led to this. How certain superhuman, structural evolutions on a large scale were decisive in this process, is the subject of other studies. The present study focuses primarily on the question of freedom of choice and responsibility of individuals.
3. The social psychological context
I am convinced that in many cases the moral choices people make – if it is a free choice at all – are the result of the interaction of their character, formed by the individual’s (neuro)biology and experiences in the early childhood, of the environment (parents, peergroup, education, class, culture, climate…) in which a person is brought up, of the circumstances in which people find themselves, and of the very individual’s behaviour. To me it is clear that personality is not only the result of the combination of nature and nurture only.
Psychologist Zukier states that “Character is defined by an ongoing conflict; it is the outcome of the choices an individual makes, among the possibilities open to him within certain constraints, be the moral norms or the fear of being punished. He may, for instance, subordinate his short-time pleasure to his long-term interests or goals, or the other way around.” (205) The consequence of this point of view is that physically and mentally healthy people definitely have a free will, but one that is restricted, but can be enlarged as well – within certain biological limits of course. And I also agree with the Oliners when they say that: “To a large extent [but not always]… helping Jews was less a decision made at a critical juncture than a choice prefigured by an established character and way of life. As Iris Murdoch observes, the moral life is not something that is switched on at a particular crisis but is rather something that goes on continually in the small piecemeal habits of living. Hence, ‘at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.’” (222) In short, to a great extent our biological and biographical past already determines “our” choice today for the direction of our future (and that of others too). And although it seems to be, philosopher Todorov’s point of view is not completely incompatible with this. He is convinced that: “Human beings are never entirely unable to choose. No matter how great the pressures, the individual remains responsible for his actions; otherwise, he renounces his humanity. Still, when these pressures are truly great, our judgment of the individual must take them into account… Once again, to deny the capacity of the individual to wrest himself away from the influence of his origins or environment is to strip him of his humanity.” (232, 239) He is right, but at the same time, we should not emphasize autonomy too much as the basis for moral behaviour in general and rescue behaviour in particular. “The virtue that may arise out of attachments, care, and affiliations with other people is no less meritorious or reliable than that which arises out of autonomous abstract thought,” mention the Oliners correctly. (254) And people with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) for example have obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviour that make their lives into a hell, driving a lot of them towards suicide. They cannot help it and for some of them neither medication nor any form of therapy helps. For those people the last hope rests on the implantation of electrodes in the brain. I only give this example to show that the individual’s capacity to choose really freely may be very small. Before passing a moral judgment about someone’s responsibility for the choice(s) they made, or did not make, we have to take into account the context in which these people found themselves.
In my view, historian and philosopher Van den Bergh was right when he formulated a few fundamental questions: “[W]ere the choices always so clear and easy? Are good and bad unambiguous, always and for everyone recognizable?... Did they really choose? Always? Everybody?... Aren’t choices determined also by structures and processes that surmount the individual?” (302, 303) His questions also point to another discussion. “Many issues concerning the behaviour of the protagonists (perpetrators, victims, and bystanders) during the Holocaust revolve around the question of intentionality. Empathic accounts of the perpetrators [like Browning’s account in Ordinary Men, Milgram’s, Zimbardo’s] stress their limited intentionality; critical accounts [like Goldhagen’s very controversial account in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners] stress their full intentionality; sometimes even, one might say, their excess of intentionality, in depicting entire populations as homogeneously and virulently anti-Semitic, or detecting concrete intentions of mass murder at the very beginnings of a fifteen- to twenty-year sequence of events. Similarly, victims or bystanders may be depicted as having too little intentionality, (passivity; indifference) rescuers may be portrayed with excess intentionality, as supermen and women who carefully planned and executed their good deeds. Historical analysis calls into question these extreme characterizations, and psychological analysis suggests that they are highly improbable.” (Zukier: 199) Therefore I reject every monocausal explanation of the behaviour of individuals in the holocaust, and every solely intentionalist, functionalist and essentialist view on bystanders, victims and perpetrators. I also want to distinguish between group and individual, although the group a person belongs to may have a large impact on one’s behaviour, for better or for worse. I concluded that it is far to complicated to find the full reason or motivation why people acted as they did, or did not act where they should have done so. It is no longer possible to interview the rescuers and ask them about their motivation to help Jews. Therefore our first priority goes is to the search through documents and testimonies we have collected, looking for elements that give us more insight into the issue of free will and/or determinism in the behaviour of bystanders, helpers, rescuers, victims, survivors and perpetrators, of necessity or chance and the perception of the reality of wartime influencing decisions and experiences.
“Study of the Holocaust needs differentiation and complexity, an interactional perspective: complex accounts of interaction between personal and situational forces; simultaneous consideration of victims, perpetrators, and other protagonists in interaction; and the readmission of human (though not necessarily humane) psychological processes, which would come to light through the interaction of history with the social sciences. For the Holocaust is more than the sum of all or the dominance of some of its individual elements. Only by considering the mutual influence of all protagonists and factors on each other will we be able to reach a better understanding of the Holocaust, however incomplete it is bound to remain.” (Zukier: 210)
4. The descriptive analysis of individual choices and moral responsibility of bystanders, helpers, rescuers, victims and perpetrators.
4.1 Bystanders, helpers and rescuers and their responses
Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too,
then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house,
that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.
Karl Barth
4.1.1 To choose or not to choose
“Ultimately it has to be remembered that the relationship with the enemy or the occupying forces and the freedoms that were possible were of crucial importance during the war in determining the responses of bystanders. Yet national, local and other traditions and discourses were also of deep significance… As ever, the wheres and the whens, especially the local context, are vital in situating and explaining the often ambivalent responses of individuals, particularly in the understandably emotive issue of the fate of the Jews. Once the context and specificity are taken into account, one is left with the role of the individual as moral agent, and the choices, however limited, that were put before him or her. It is these choices that make the study of the bystander so compelling, but given the complexity of the modern world, we should be cautious not to overstate the bystander’s responsibility and power, thereby ignoring those who are the real perpetrators and their determination to carry out genocide, or forgetting, in our moral indignation, those who are the persecutor’s victims.” (Boxham & Kushner: 200, 201)
“Was the rescue primarily a matter of opportunity – that is, a question of external circumstances? If so, what were they? Was rescue a matter of personal attributes – particular learned values and personality characteristics? If so, what were they? Implicit in these questions is the notion that there may exist something called an ‘altruistic personality’; that is, a relatively enduring predisposition to act selflessly on behalf of others, which develops early in life. For this reason we were interested not only in what our respondents did during the war and the circumstances of their wartime lives but also in their parents and their youthful characteristics and behaviours as well as their current behaviours… For the purpose of our study, we prefer a definition that relies on objective, measurable criteria. We characterize a behaviour as altruistic when (1) it is directed towards helping another, (2) it involves a high risk or sacrifice for the actor, (3) it is accompanied by no external reward, and (4) it is voluntary… Our study is rooted in a social psychological orientation, which assumes that behaviour is best explained as the result of an interaction between personal and external social, or situational, factors. We view an altruistic behaviour as the outcome of a decision-making process in which the internal characteristics of actors as well as external environments in which they find themselves influence each other. Personal factors include personality characteristics and values. Situational factors are the immediate external environmental conditions over which the actor has no control but that nonetheless affect a decision. Some decisions are more rooted in personal dispositional factors, others are more dependent on situational factors.” (Oliner & Oliner: 3, 6, 10) Eva Fogelman shares this point of view too, and so do I: “Altruism, we felt, was a stable personality characteristic, but altruistic behaviours are jointly determined by the combination of personality and situational features. Opportunity to help, social support for such action, economic resources, nature of living quarters, and characteristics of the person in need of help are all factors which impeded or enhanced the proclivity to rescue.” (Fogelman, 1994, xiv-xv) The views of the Oliners and Fogelman are also compatible with these of [psychologist] Staub and [sociologist] Tec. “In his study of rescuers, Ervin Staub states, ‘Goodness, like evil, often begins in small steps. Heroes evolve; they aren’t born. Very often the rescuers make only a small commitment at the start – to hide someone for a day or two. But once they had taken that step, they began to see themselves differently, as someone who helps. What starts as mere willingness becomes intense involvement.’ Nechama Tec and Ervin Staub discussed the sociology and motivations of rescuers at the Second Annual Facing History Conference. Both agreed that the decision to rescue Jews had little to do with the rescuer’s religion, nationality, schooling, class, or ethnic heritage. Most rescuers were independent individuals who refused to follow the crowd. They also had a history of performing good deeds and did not perceive rescue work as anything out of the ordinary.” (Strom & Parsons: 381-382) Zukier confirms the foot-between-the-door process but he is more critical of the altruistic character of the rescuer: “The relentless search for the ‘typical’ attributes of rescuers, the main focus of most studies, has proven fruitless… Becoming a rescuer, it appears, was a gradual process of increasing radicalization of action, and not simply the natural flourishing of the best in man. None of this suggests a ‘functionalist’ argument: clearly the rescuers agreed to help where others declined. Yet even the rescuers did not simply volunteer, and acted under the press of, and in interactions with, circumstances. The findings do suggest the limits of the ‘acting out’ perspective which endows the protagonists with boundless intentionality and thereby short-circuits yet again the agonized decision-making and the psychological transformation which took place.” (208, 209)
Before making an important distinction between ordinary ‘bystanders’, helpers and rescuers, we first want to give some information about something that all the bystanders, helpers and rescuers we have studied shared, something that united them, and that determined who could be trusted, and who could be asked for help and hiding Jews: their religion.
4.1.2 The specific religious context of our Protestant Reformed bystanders, helpers and rescuers
“Members of the 8 percent of the population who belonged to the Reformed Churches accounted for an estimated 25 percent of the rescues of Dutch Jews… The opposition of French Protestant churches to Vichy’s Jewish policies was more consistent than that of the Catholic hierarchy. As a small minority with a history of persecution in France, French Protestants were sensitive to the consequences of prejudice and fearful that Vichy might exclude them from public life too. The Protestant CIMADE (Comité d’Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Evacués), which had been established before the war to aid refugees, threw itself into Jewish relief work during the occupation.” (Oliner & Oliner: 38, 42) The group of bystanders, helpers and rescuers we’ve studied were all Protestants belonging to the Reformed Churches, a small religious minority in a country that was predominantly Catholic, and gathered in this informal network together they tried to save the lives of more than thirty Jews. At least 22 of them survived. Their faith was important for them, although it certainly differed from one person to another. Especially in the case of Klaas Sluys and Truus Rooze-van Buuren their deeds stemmed largely from their deep faith, in both cases combined with the inner conviction that they had a mission to fulfill. We already could read this in the last letter that Klaas wrote from prison to Julia: “Little Jule, it is not people who sent me away, although they think so. It is God himself who calls me to a place I do not know. And I ought to follow. I can’t but follow. Where would I go without Him? He knows what is good for us. He is holding the hands of both of us and he leads us along the road. He wants what is good, what is safe, what leads to salvation. Should I in my foolishness choose another way?... I know, that – if we were allowed to choose - we in our foolishness and weakness, we would prefer to choose each other and let Him wait. But God loves us so much that he doesn't let us choose, and that He does what He knows is best for us…” As early as September 25 1937 Klaas gave a lecture in Antwerp on the persecution of the churches in Germany. (Saerens, 2000: 364) This means that he was anything but a passive bystander. He was rather a missionary, with an incredible, and especially for quite some Catholic people in Boechout irritating religious zeal, and as a preacher he was always prepared to say and write what he thought was God’s will, and to act according to this belief. We may not forget that he was sentenced not only for hiding Jews, but also for listening to the B.B.C.broadcasts and for printing and spreading too many religious pamphlets with the message: “No peace without Christ”. Although he’d already been a busy, but successful businessman before the war, in his free time, he started publishing a little religious newspaper for the young and from 1954 until his premature death in 1965, he was the publisher and general editor of the Protestant monthly “Vlaams Kerkblad” with an extraordinary 50,000 printed copies. After the war Klaas proved to be a charismatic leader inspiring more and more people to found a new parish for a fast growing community of Reformed Protestants in the surroundings of Boechout. He was the driving force and one of the founding fathers of the Protestant church and of the School with the Bible in Boechout. For these activities he got a lot of vicious opposition and active obstruction from the leading Catholics in Boechout, who saw the growing success of the Protestants as a threat. One of their leaders was the former war mayor and militant Catholic, Staf Van Sintjan. In 1960 Van Sintjan and Klaas both wrote not very diplomatically formulated articles against each other’s belief, but very soon the controversy became very personal. At the funeral of Klaas the Reverend Mr. Appelo called Klaas “a prophet”: “Prophets are often difficult people [to live with]. And, perhaps, so was brother Sluys, but that’s exactly what makes them prophets.” A splendid example of what Klaas was able to achieve was the very moving letter Van Sintjan wrote to Klaas’ wife Julia, when he heard that Klaas was very ill: “I was deeply moved reading the dreadful message about the serious illness of your husband, because in the bitter struggle I fought with him, Mr. Sluys has influenced my spiritual life enormously. The struggle forced me towards study and deeper insight in Protestantism and the Bible, and brought me to more inner experience of the Word of God… If his condition allows it, it would make me happy, dear madam, if you would convey my sympathy to him. That it may give him consolation knowing that a former opponent thinks of him with affection and that he prays for him.”
In the sentence of the Kriegsgericht we can read what Klaas said about his motivation to hide Jews: “Über die Beweggründe zu seiner Handlungsweise äussert sich der Angeklagte dahin, dass er als Christ aus Mitgefühl gehandelt habe. Er hatte es nicht über das Herz gebracht, die Juden dem Elend preiszugeben.” This was also confirmed by a Flemish member of the Sipo-SD, Debra, who declared in preparation of his own trial, that he spoke in favour of Klaas for the same reason: “Sluys was Protestant, very religious and well known for his charitable activities. I want to point out the fact that I, in the same sense, have spoken to the German Judge Baudisch, to whom I gave [horse] riding-lessons.” Even if he’s lying about his intervention, the fact that almost five years after Klaas’ arrest he spontaneously mentions that Klaas was very religious and well known for his works of charity is very significant. But on Klaas’ trial Baudisch reacted to Klaas’s religious motivation, by saying: “Auch die angeblichen Beweggründe des Angeklagten können mildernd nicht ins Gewicht fallen. In harten Kriegszeiten ist für derartige Gefühle kein Raum, wenn sie sich so offensichtlich gegen sichtige Anordnungen der Besatzungsmacht richten.” This cruel sentence is a perfect illustration of what Jonathan Glover noticed: “Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception [and misplaced sentimentality]. The Judaeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison… The choice of conflict and hardness over compassion was central to the Nazi Outlook.” (326) A member of the Sipo-SD, and also present at the arrest of Klaas, Jan Schuermans, admitted that Baudish punished severely indeed.
“[I]n some cases, the presence of two authorities, one sanctioning antisocial action and the other sanctioning prosocial action, allowed or permitted the subjects to follow the impulse to do good precisely because they had a choice of which authority to follow. Dutch Calvinists rescued Jews: because they believed the Jewish people were the people of God and, hence, Christians were obliged to rescue them; because they had a ministry to the persecuted; or because they were predestined to rescue.” (Blumenthal: 43) And that is exactly what motivated Klaas and Julia, Truus and Henri, Henri and Margriet for example. The German theologian Karl Barth’s “basis for demanding that we help the Jews was that they are the people of God. That was a new basis for understanding the Bible, Judaism, and with that for understanding anti-Semitism as well.” (Strom & Parsons: 398) For some feeling closeness to the Jewish people came from their reading and understanding the Hebrew Bible. Fundamentalist Christians, who grew up with biblical stories, felt a love for this ancient people. Some of these Judeophiles had never met a Jew, but when given an opportunity to rescue one, they were more than willing. They felt a religious connection to Jesus, a single Jew, or to those people the Hebrew Bible said were chosen by God. (Fogelman, 1994: 191) “For some Dutch Reformed rescuers, all Jews had special merit regardless of the behaviours or attributes of individuals, for it was bestowed by God himself,” (Oliner & Oliner: 154) and indeed, several descendants of the Protestant rescuers confirmed that the rescuing of Jews had something to do with the fact that the religious faith of the Reformed churches saw the Jews as the chosen people of God. “Religious-moral rescuers described their sense of right and wrong in religious rather than ethical terms. Their morality was based on religious tenets such as ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ and precepts about how to treat others and how to live their lives… During the war and after, when faced with dire circumstances or morally complex questions, these rescuers relied on their faith to see them through crises…’” (Fogelman, 1994: 163, 164) The last letter from prison Klaas wrote to his wife, Julia, illustrates this perfectly. He certainly was an intrinsically motivated religious man, who derived satisfaction from internalizing the precepts of religion. “[Intrinsically motivated religious people] connect emotionally to what is said and taught each Sunday… Religious rescuers believe it was their obligation to conduct their lives according to the Christian principles of compassion and charity. Indeed, this conviction among religious rescuers – that they were accountable to a higher and more fearsome authority – was the most salient aspect of their rescuer self. It overcame anti-Semitism, transcended fear, and impelled them to action. This was what defined religious-moral rescuers before, during and after the war.”(Fogelman, 1994: 175, 176-177)
One of the founding fathers of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands was Abraham Kuyper. His motto was: “In isolation lies our force”. In a predominantly Catholic country belonging to the Reformed Churches set them apart from their contemporaries. They were loosely integrated into their communities, a condition Tec refers to as individuality or separateness. (Tec, 1991: 218) “Being on the periphery of a community means being less affected by existing social controls. With individuality, then, come fewer social constraints and a higher level of independence – in other words, an opportunity to act in accordance with personal values and moral precepts, even when these are in opposition to societal expectations. And so, to the extent that people are less controlled by their environment and are more independent, they are more likely to be guided by their own moral imperatives, regardless of whether or not these imperatives conform to societal expectations.” (Tec, 1991: 218-219) “Perry London suggested an element of ‘social marginality’ among rescuers. Their alienation made them more sympathetic to another outside group.” (Fogelman, 1998: 675) But their relatively isolated life as a religious minority among a very dominant Catholic majority also was their strength, and this may explain why so many individuals or married couples of this relatively small community, were prepared to help Jews in one way or another. They tended to choose spouses who shared a similar religious feeling, and so a lot of them became closely related to each other. Through long-standing bonds of marriage and friendship in this rather closed but tightly knit community, they knew each other well, and using these contacts, Klaas and René established a small and discreet informal network of fellow helpers and rescuers they could trust. The bonds of trust for their covert activities were strengthened by the faith and values they had in common, and the familiarity amongst them also partly explains why nobody of the (arrested) rescuers ever betrayed anyone of the other helpers and rescuers within this group. This is one of the reasons why so many of the hidden Jews survived.
Marius Joosten is the only one of the Protestant people still alive today who has known them all. In a very interesting e-mail he agreed with me that: “Klaas had been not an easy person to live with and Truus was a consequent Christian, who impulsively did what she thought that should happen… My wife remembers her mother giving coupons for milk to the Reverend Mr. Winter, who had a summer-house in his garden, ‘where Jews were hidden’… To grasp the motivation of the ‘Reformed Group’… their central question seems to be: ‘Have we been faithful?’ They start from the theological idea that all people (themselves included) ‘are incapable of doing any good; and that they are predisposed to doing all kinds of evil things’… I think that the way they lived ‘their faith’ (as they called it) was a central element in their motivation. Our whole life was determined by it in a way that is difficult to identify with for people today [because times have changed]. We spend a significant part of our time on religious activities, like two divine services of one hour each every Sunday; praying and reading the Bible at the three meals each day; individual and collective study of the Bible; evangelization. Perhaps in this respect, what Klaas did after 1945 was perhaps more typical of who he was, than his work as a [successful] business man. The evangelization, principally antithetic towards the Roman Catholic Church and especially towards the worshipping of Maria at Edegem… He considered his money as lent by the Lord, and he used it to found the Children’s Home; the Church with the Bible and the Reformed Church [at Boechout]. As for Truus and Henri - I only got to know them later on, but based on what I saw at that time (especially with Truus; Henri was a taciturn person), I see their motivation along the same lines of their faith also.” Religion is a matter of choices, because principally one can change one’s religion, but these Protestants would have said that their faith and every act into line with it, was God’s choice, not theirs. That included their rescuing Jews.
4.1.3 The bystanders
4.1.3.1 The grandfather Médard Schuyten
During the First World War, two of his sons volunteered to go to the front. His elder son, Médard Jnr., got very badly wounded and had to be moved to the south of France, where he miraculously recovered. The younger son, René, was killed in July 1916. One month earlier, in June 1916, Médard received a visitor from Berlin: the German scientific authority, Professor Th. Ziehen, a friend of Médard. On behalf of the occupying force, he offered Médard a professorship at the Philosophical Faculty of the new Flemish University of Gent. Médard, who was the first in Belgium to be a Doctor of Natural Sciences at the University of Gent with a doctoral dissertation written in Dutch, was a member of the Flemish University Commission and he fully agreed with the principle to start a real Flemish University. Nevertheless he refused the attractive offer, because – says his biographer Peeters – he had conscientious objections. He didn’t change his mind, even when other Flemish authorities tried to convince him to accept the offer. Making this choice, he proved that one could be perfectly pro-Flemish, without collaborating with the Germans.
After the War something happened to him and his son Henri to change their lives and to have a major impact on the lives of Henri’s children: Jeanne, Julia, René and Wim. In a letter Médard’s last surviving grandson, Wim Schuyten, wrote me what happened:
“Both my father [Hendrik Schuyten] and grandfather [Médard Schuyten] were atheists, until some time after the First World War. That war took the life of one of my grandfather Médard’s sons [René Schuyten, °29.3.1897-†18.7.1916], and critically wounded another one [Médard Schuyten Jnr.]. It is our perception that these events may have shaken grandfather’s atheistic confidence and forced his thinking in the direction of spiritual realities. My father, Henri, was exempt from military service because he was already the father of one daughter (Jeanne, [°31.10.1913]) and they were expecting another child (Julia, [°16.11.1914]). He and his young wife [Margaretha van Oudheusden], a then practising Roman Catholic, and their two little children went through the hardships and deprivations of the German occupation like everyone else. With the return of peace and a relative prosperity after the War, my brother René was born on May 7 1919. Sometime during this period my father together with my grandfather attended an evangelical meeting. According to my father’s later testimony, their (or at least his) subconscious hope when going to such a meeting was that their atheistic convictions might be vindicated as measured against the “naive” beliefs of Christians. Apparently, they experienced the exact opposite, and came home rather shaken and subdued. It was, for both of them, a factor in their eventual conversion to Christianity…
My grandparents at some point began to attend the outreach ministries of an American mission under the leadership of a military officer by the name of Norton – which earned this particular group acquired the nickname “The Nortons”.
When the Second World War broke out, Médard started to write his war diary. He was a pretty well-informed intellectual and a Protestant strongly believing in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon culture, because, in his opinion, the Bible clearly revealed that Great-Britain was the natural ally of “Israel”: “The Bible says, pointing to the long way of martyrdom of the Jews throughout the ages, that the executioners will not escape their terrible punishment.” Right from the beginning, he believed that Germany ultimately would lose the war: “On the other side of Hitler stands Great-Britain that fights for the freedom of the world, appointed to this in the Holy Scriptures… to revenge the drama that the Germans bestowed on the Jews.” If his war diary had been found by the Gestapo, the consequences for writing it with an outspoken anti-German content would have been severe. Was it courageous to have written it? Probably, but the real value of this document lies in the fact that his war diary was already published in March 1945, when the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen had not yet been liberated and the people in Belgium had not yet seen the pictures made when these camps were liberated. Because he had chosen to publish it, he was one of the first to confront his fellow citizens and bystanders with the detailed description of the atrocities the Jews had suffered, and from time to time he sounded like a public prosecutor. Even today he deserves credit for having published it, because his war diary proves that at least from September 1942 on, every bystander in Antwerp had to know that what was happening to the Jews was completely unacceptable. Several times, the Belgian historians Steinberg and Saerens both refer to this valuable diary in their works on the persecution of the Jews in Belgium. Thanks to the war diary we know now that every normal adult living in Antwerp at that time lies when they claim they didn’t know. On the other hand however, Médard himself also was a bystander, too. There is one occasion which he describes on January 6 1941 that illustrates this. To get an article published in the Revue Générale des Sciences Pures in Paris, he has to confirm that he is not a Jew. And so he does. He could have refused to, but he didn’t. His ambition as a scientist to publish was too strong.
“Historian Leni Yahil divides knowledge into three parts: receipt of information, acknowledgement of that information, and action based on the information… Do people know? Have they acknowledged the information? Have they acted on that knowledge?” (Strom & Parsons, 369) Médard knew, he acknowledged, but he didn’t act. He continued to write down his indignation and his annoyance, but he never performed an act of resistance.
4.1.3.2 The grandson Wim Schuyten
Médard’s second son, Henri Schuyten was married to Margriet van Oudheusden. They had four children: Jeanne (°1913), Julia (°1914), René (°1915) and Wim (°1925). Henri and his wife, as well as his three eldest children (and their partners) would help and hide Jews. Starting in 1942 up to the summer of 1944 Wim, the youngest one, worked on a farm in France, as otherwise he’d have been called up for Arbeitseinsatz in Germany. More than sixty years later, Wim wrote me what he still remembered. Although most of his information is second-hand, he gives a good picture of a group of ‘helpers’ we’ll deal with right away, and what’s more, he is closely related to most of these rescuers. Of his generation, he is the only surviving bystander of whom still alive we still could ask some questions.
I spent the summer hols of 1942 in France, working at a farm. I was 17 when I came home toward the end of August 1942. I had a tentative agreement with the farmer to return and work for him - subject to the approval of my parents. With their permission I went back and stayed in France for most of the duration of the war. (I had 2 or 3 brief furtive visits to my parents during that time.) [He came to Belgium after the harvest, around the end of August or the beginning of September 1942. He came once more on Christmas 1942, and next he stayed in France until the summer of 1944.].
When I was home that first time in August 1942, I met the Jewish guests of my parents. They were an elderly couple. Their name was Finkel. My parents also told me that Klaas and Julia were hiding Jews in their house and that several families of our church were also hiding Jews.
The name of one family I remember: “Hendricks.” (I don’t know if I spell the name right). They were farmers and originally came from Geel. There were also Antoine and Bertus Rooze, who took part. My brother René and his wife Nelly also had Jews in their house. I think two. All people involved were members of our church: “Gereformeerde Kerk” [Reformed Church], Sanderusstraat, Antwerp.
As to your questions: How, who why, etc., I will do my best to answer them. Remember that information came to me secondhand, as I spent most of the war years away from home:
There was no “central organization”, urging and recruiting people to help Jews. What happened in Boechout – and I suppose everywhere in Europe where Jewish people were helped – developed spontaneously and as the needs of the moment required.
Klaas Sluys was a businessman and had contacts with other business people in the same line (perfume oils). Many of these were Jews. I remember that even before the persecution really began in earnest, he counselled them to ignore the orders of the Germans to wear David’s star. When that counsel was not followed they were, of course, easy targets for the Gestapo – and when their situation became desperate, they – or at least some of them – turned for help to the one who had shown a concern for them. This was (I think) the main category of the Jews who were hidden. Others were directed to Klaas by Christian people who knew Jews, but were in no position themselves to give them shelter – like my sister Jeanne, who was a head nurse at Stuyvenberg Hospital.
Why? I do not believe there was any motivation other than the command to “Love your neighbour as yourself” and the clear Biblical mandate to “relieve the oppressed”, as given in Isaiah 1:17 and many other Bible passages. To live the Christian ethic involves the taking of risks – some of them lethal.
After Klaas was arrested along with the Jewish people in his house (except one little girl), the fear was that the involvement of others was known to the Gestapo as well, and that home invasions and arrests would follow. It was decided then that the other Jews would have to be moved elsewhere. The little girl was smuggled to a family in the country by Antoine Rooze. An apartment in Brussels was rented from a landlord willing to take the risk, and the remaining Jews (20 individuals [correction 12 individuals]) were housed there until the end of the war.
My brother René was to supply them with the food they required. This involved trading hard currencies (Dollars and Pounds Sterling) on the black market, and smuggling it to them.
About the logistics and financing of the operations I don’t know any details except that some of the money came from my sister Julia, and some from those of the Jews who had managed to save some of their hard assets from disaster.
4.1.4 The helpers and rescuers
“A comparison of rescuers, bystanders, and rescued survivors showed that both rescuers and bystanders had opportunities to rescue, and were equally aware of the plight of Jews. While rescuers took action, bystanders who had similar knowledge refrained. We may say that opportunity may have facilitated rescue, but it did not by any means determine it. Of the many reasons for rescue expressed by our respondents, an overwhelming majority of rescuers, 87 percent, cited at least one ethical or humanitarian consideration in their actions. This ethics cited included justice, that is, the persecution of the innocent could not be justified. The ethic that mattered most, however, was compassion.” (Oliner, 1998: 679)
“Help was by and large scarce and it was rendered most often at the last moment, after the start of roundups or deportations. Even then, the helpers seldom took the initiative… in the usual case throughout Europe, the potential rescuer was approached by a victim or by someone already engaged in assisting stranded people… There were two kinds of help. One was occasional, transitory, and relatively risk-free, such as alerting an unsuspecting victim of planned arrests, giving directions to fleeing Jews, diverting pursuers, or providing destitute individuals with small amounts of food, clothing or money. The second was the more durable help, particularly shelter over time. Often enough payment was tendered for such protection, but that is not to say that the helper acted solely for profit or even that, all things considered, there was a business deal…
What kind op persons were helpers? Basically, one may distinguish between people who wanted to save specific individuals or categories of individuals and those who willingly assisted almost any Jews, including total strangers. The selective helpers included first of all friends, relatives by intermarriage, and former business associates, employers, or employees. In all these situations a relationship or bond had been formed before the war, and there might have been some expectation of assistance in times of trouble. Sometimes, a gentile household was prepared to harbour a Jewish child…. Like the perpetrators, whose exact opposites they were, they could not explain their motivations. They would characterize their actions as ordinary or natural, and after the war some of them were embarrassed by praise. Often they were members of a community [of the Reformed Church (for those helpers and rescuers we have studied)], or they were at least in touch with like-minded people in a loose network of helpers. Many of them had to make their decisions instantaneously. In this sense, they shared a personality characteristic with the Jewish fugitive who also acted rapidly.” (Hilberg: 213, 214) “In most cases the helping of Jews was done by ‘simple people’. A lot of the helpers we encountered seemed to come out of nowhere. Sometimes the help was informal en it came spontaneously, like from scandalised neighbours, relations by marriage, business relations, friends and colleagues. But mostly it were the persecuted themselves who took the initiative and, asked, often of strangers, for help for them or for their children. Active helpers in the Antwerp region were an extremely small minority, but it must be said that the success of the hiding depended also on the silent complicity of the Belgian street,” (Saerens, 2000: 732) the minimum decency one might expect, of at least silence if they knew where Jews were hidden.
“‛Rescuers’ is the appropriate title for bystanders who decide to take an active role in protecting victims. In interviews, they always deny that they have done anything special. They always refuse the epithets ‘heroic’ and ‘extremely courageous.’ Part of the mystery of goodness, then, is its banality; that is, the normalcy and rationalized character of it. Doing good is natural, prosaic for those who practise it… How does one assess merit for such goodness? Some rescuers are professionals; others are motivated by financial gain; while others act spontaneously, out of some deep inner goodness or caring motive.” (Blumenthal: 8) “Becoming a rescuer meant becoming aware of the imminent danger to and probable death of Jews. It was a clear-eyed view – seeing what others did not. It took a determined effort to discover the truth, to be aware. Those who became rescuers made that effort.” (Fogelman, 1998:664)
4.1.4.1 The son: Henri Schuyten and his wife Margriet Oudheusden
Henri Schuyten had a very close relationship with his parents, especially with his mother. Médard Schuyten never performed an act of resistance. His son, Henri, however did. He and his wife Margriet, who was a very quiet woman, hid several Jews, and Jan Laplasse, one of the specialists in the Flemish Resistance, confirmed that in January 1944 Henri was a member of the Resistance. He worked as chief-clerk in the civil service of quays and hangars in the (from a strategic point of view extremely important) port of Antwerp. In the Resistance network called Jean, Henri and his colleagues used obstruction and delay, and they were very efficient at slowing down things. In an e-mail his granddaughter Ann Williams Lyzenga wrote to me:
My grandfather in the little he told me about that time said that the Germans had low opinion of Belgian efficiency and intelligence and this was one of tools that was used: this method: "O dear, things have gone terribly wrong, we have no idea how this happened, so very sorry, we didn't have the staff to adequately monitor the situation, in the bustle of dealing with a bombing attack, we neglected to keep track of this or that person, our records are in disarray, etc." This was a cause of disagreement among those who opposed the Germans: how frank should one be. My grandfather said once with great emphasis that the correct method was complete and fawnish compliance in public, appearing to be too stupid to get anything right, and then he said with great heat, "and stick them in the back with a knife when they are least expecting it." I don't know if this was a literal or figurative example. This little comment and the cryptic references he made at other times told me that there were many heated disagreements about what was the right thing to do. My grandfather also appeared to have sources of information other people did not have. My mother [Jeanne Schuyten] had a radio capable of receiving the BBC, and she said that one day her father appeared at the hospital, (where she had a room - she went home to her parents on her days off) and took her radio because he said there would be a search for radios in the near future, and so there was. My grandfather also told of having Jewish teenaged boys staying with him and my grandmother. He sent them elsewhere because the boys insisted on going out in the evening after dark because they couldn't stand the confinement. My grandfather said he couldn't keep them because it exposed him and his family to too much danger. If they had been caught, they would have been forced to talk. My grandfather said everyone eventually talks if the Germans decide you know something, and he included himself in that. He said that it was important to know as little as possible, and to keep information in compartments so less would be compromised if someone talked.
Another granddaughter, Gwyneth Williams White, could add an interesting remark to this story, namely the fact that Henri kept silent about his work in the Resistance, even for his wife.
I knew that my grandfather was part of the resistance; my mother (Jeanne Schuyten Williams) told me of this many times. I'm not surprised that there is an official record of this. My mother also told me he kept this a secret from his wife, my grandmother, because of the danger in which he placed himself. He never spoke of the war with me or my sisters during his visits to the U.S.A.; I believe he preferred to keep these things in the past. I also was told by my mother that when her mother (Margriet) discovered that her husband was part of the resistance during the war, she was very angry. No doubt he could have lost his life, and lives of his family as well. Perhaps she felt she should have been informed of his activities; I don't know. Her feelings and reasons for them are lost to history.
Already in the summer of 1942 Henri and Margriet hid Jews; together with Klaas and Julia, they were probably among the first to do so. Wim Schuyten wrote to me: “My parents did not get into contact with the Jews. The Jews got into contact with Klaas Sluys, who in turn asked my parents for their cooperation in hiding them.” From Julia’s testimony we learn that Gottfried Finkel asked Klaas for help for his blind mother, his father and sister, because they were afraid to be rounded up for deportation, as happened to many other Jews at that moment. And Wim Schuyten could confirm to us that his father and mother hid Markus Finkel and his wife, Laura Einig, for a longer time, until the moment Germans looking for Jews wanted to search the house. One of Henri’s grandsons, Peter Schuyten, told me about this very dangerous moment. Henri, authoritatively, asked them for their search-warrant. When it turned out that they didn’t have one, he told them they could come back when they had one. The Germans were so intimidated by this that they left. The moment they returned, Henri and Margriet quickly got the Finkels out of their house. This story, illustrating the cool-bloodedness of Henri, was confirmed by Peter Schuyten’s first wife, Cobie Vondeling.
His granddaughter, Gwyneth, wrote to me: “My grandfather was outspoken, assertive, much like his daughter, my mother [Jeanne]. In 1975 his son René confirms this image of his father in a letter he wrote to his mother just after his father’s death: “Father was a strong man, spiritually and physically, a good man, and a man who had a heart for the many sufferers of this world: the unemployed, the orphans, the persecuted Jews, the many unfortunate ones, sharing at our table, whom I remember from childhood. People on whose behalf he was constantly busy, without ever thinking of reward.” Henri was an elder in his parish, and he was one of the Protestants of the Sanderusstraat who supported Jewish refugees before the war. “These people were transients, trying to get farther away from Germany, to England or the U.S.A., and were staying in Antwerp only as long as it took to get their visas – a process that could take months. We had some of them at our table almost daily. They were friends in the sense that we did what we could for them, and thanked God that we had the means for it. When the Germans invaded our country, those who were still in Antwerp joined the stream of refugees into France, and were never heard of again,” Wim Schuyten wrote to me. And in a recent letter from him, we can read the same things, when he gives a pretty good impression of the atmosphere in what he calls “our” home:
“My father was converted from his Atheism to Christianity at around the time of my birth in 1925. The aftermath of WWI brought an epidemic of typhoid fever to an exhausted and weakened population. Both my parents were affected by this during my mother’s pregnancy that ended in my birth on May 13 1925. During that illness my father was hospitalized and put on the “critical” list. Waking up one night out of one of his feverish dreams, he saw the attending nurse nearby, reading a book. He asked: “What are you reading?” She answered: “The Bible.” He suggested, “Why don’t you read it out loud?” She did, and from that time on she read to him when she had opportunity, and led him to a Biblical understanding of the Christian religion. Her name was Betsy van Eck. She was a member of the Reformed Church, and became a friend of the family, whom even I remember. My father was converted and baptized. He determined to lead his family in the Biblical doctrines of the Christian faith, which he did. This was a dramatic, all encompassing turn around: He was changed from being a moral man into a spiritual man – He was “born again” – as per the Evangel of St. John, chapter 3, verses 5-8. This condition gave him new priorities, which included primarily the desire that his children would receive this new life as well – and the determination to be instructed in the doctrines of the Christian religion. In this he was supported and assisted by his spouse, my mother.
My two sisters, Jeanne and Julia, are, respectively, 12 and 11 years older than myself. So that, when I was 6, these two were young ladies, who were willing and capable co-instructors and tutors of their little brother. My “big” brother René, who was 6 years older than myself, I relied on primarily as protector from bullies.
Our family had meals together whenever our respective work and school schedules permitted, which was at least once, and sometimes twice a day. These meals were preceded by prayer and thanksgiving, and followed by a reading from the Bible. We read consecutively from Genesis to Revelation, and then started all over again. This, in combination with Sunday school, catechism classes and two sermons every Sunday, laid the foundation of a fairly accurate acquaintance with the major themes of the Bible by the time I was in my early teens.
We lived in the Speerstraat 27 [in Antwerp], “op ‘t Kiel”, and went to church in the Sanderusstraat every Sunday, late in the morning and early in the evening. When there were strangers or lonely-looking people in church my father would invite them for dinner. We had some guests at our table almost every Sunday. Klaas Sluys was one the frequent guests to appreciate not only of my mother’s good cooking, but also of my sister Julia’s good looks. Similarly, I became acquainted with my, then future, bride, Joan, at my mother’s table, a decade or so later.
Our guests, in general, were intelligent people of different backgrounds and experience, but sharing a biblical world-and-life view. I was a silent, but eager, listener to the conversations that developed after dinner. These were wide-ranging and sometimes very intense. I’m sure that the thought processes I then began to acquire, have been foundational to my later life’s philosophy.
Although it would be decades before I could honestly call myself a Christian, I have an ever-growing respect and appreciation for the Bible – first as a piece of literature of unequalled beauty, then as the sole unbiased, coherent document relating the history of the human race (both past and future), and finally a the supernatural, God-inspired wisdom whereby we must be saved.
At 82, as last surviving member of the family, I have been careful to relate something of the atmosphere prevalent in the household of my parents.”
The rescuing activity was consistent with who Henri (and his silent wife Margriet) had been before the war and who he was afterwards. When I asked Wim Schuyten why his parents did it, he answered me: “Since I was not a direct participant, I am not qualified to answer that question, except to say this: When in late summer of 1942 I was told by my parents that they had Jewish people hidden in the house, my mind immediately and unquestioningly endorsed their decision and rejoiced in it. It was the right thing to do – and doing the right thing requires no justification, and defies explanation.” The letters from René and Wim confirm what Samuel Oliner already found out: “While none of the more than fifty studies of rescue have arrived at a single reason for rescue, nearly all concur that such motivation is most often associated with a particular type of socialization experience and moral climate in which ethical behaviour was moulded by a significant other factor, such as a parent [or a parent-in-law, like Henri]. This may help account for the frequently reiterated statements made by rescuers that helping Jews was simply the moral thing to do. Rescuers [like René] were more likely to have an extensive orientation than non-rescuers. They attached themselves to others more readily in responsible relationships and were more likely to do so inclusively. They were more likely to feel closer to their family of origin and to have been taught ethical obligations toward others. Rescuers [like Julia] were more likely to feel compassion for suffering and to try to relieve it. They were more likely to endorse pluralistic and democratic values, to reject ethnocentric stereotypes, and to have had friends from different social and religious groups in their youth. Rescuers were able to identify with people from different social, ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds. They felt that they possessed personal integrity – that is, they were more likely to perceive themselves as honest and helpful, able to take responsibility, and willing to stand up for their beliefs [as Klaas certainly did]. Of course they were less inclined to respect unquestioned obedience to authority.” (Oliner: 683) Wim writes: “My parents had a cordial relationship with the neighbour, who was Catholic. For several years my mother employed a Catholic cleaning leady, who was considered as a friend. All my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side were Catholic.”
Perhaps Henri’s and Margriet’s openess to strangers and lonely people installed in their children the democratic principle “inclusiveness” as the Oliners, in their Altruistic Personality Study called it: “a predisposition to regard all people as equals and apply similar standards of right and wrong to them without regard to their social status or ethnicity.” (Oliner & Oliner: 144) “The overwhelming majority of rescuers I interviewed, 89 percent, had a parent or adult figure who acted as an altruistic role model.” (Fogelman, 1994: 263) It is clear that Henri was such an altruistic role model, who certainly influenced Jeanne, René, Julia and Klaas. This also fits in with what Eva Fogelman found out: “It is not possible to predict who will risk his or her life for total strangers or even loved ones. No single personality type is apparent. However, certain features of family background, values, and personality increase the likelihood that certain people will resist tyranny. Despite the external differences, there are commonalities in rescuers’ upbringing. The most significant link is that most were taught to tolerate people who were different from themselves. The altruism of parents [like Henri and Margriet] provided role models for future rescuers. Involving the children in helping others enhanced ‘virtue as a habit.’ Being taught independence and self reliance as children provided the ego strength to withstand conformity… What was basic to all, however, was awareness, courage, and the ability to accept personal responsibility and acknowledge that ‘these human beings will die if I do not intervene.’” (1998: 673)
4.1.4.2 The granddaughter: Jeanne Schuyten
From the letters René and Nelly wrote to each other, I discovered that before the war Jeanne had had a relationship with a certain Tom. He was a communist, and a man her parents disapproved of. But even before the war broke out, Jeanne had broken up that relationship. Jeanne’s daughter, An Williams Lyzenga, explains: “I think my mother found their idealism attractive, but their fanaticism horrible. I recall my mother saying that Tom said that anyone who opposed the Communists would be hung from the lamp posts when they took power. She found this casual acceptance of atrocity to further his ideals intolerable. I think this reflects the crisis world Communism faced with the revelations about what Stalin had done. Stalin's cruelty outstripped the tsars', and Marx's followers had to work this into their philosophy or reject it. Tom apparently accepted the necessity of cruelty in the service of the larger goals, and my mother did not.” When I asked Dora Sluys if her parents and grandparents did charity work already before the war, she wrote that her grandmother Schuyten always had been very hospitable, always bringing along newcomers from church. She took care of babies whose mothers were ill, and aunt Jeanne went helping in a busy family.
As a head-nurse Jeanne had her own room in the hospital where she lived, but on her days off she went to her parents. This means that she had no shelter of her own to hide Jews. We don’t know who took the initiative to hide Hersz Nadel somewhere in the hospital, but because she was an assertive female leader who, expected her authority not to be questioned and her orders to be followed, we wouldn’t be surprised if one day it would turn out that she was the one to have taken the initiative for it. Certainly more people must have been informed and got involved in giving refuge. They managed to keep Hersz Nadel hidden at this hospital for months! Jeanne’s daughter, An Williams Lyzenga, mailed me: “A story I heard from my mother was about a Jewish man [Hersz Nadel] who was put in a full body cast in the hospital (I don't know if it was for treatment or just a ruse) for whom the Germans were waiting to be discharged from the hospital. He was left in the cast for a long time, and even after the cast was removed, he would be put back in when someone came to inquire about him… He left the hospital "against medical advice", and when the authorities came looking for him, everyone played dumb and said he had walked away without the staff knowing he was going; he was just gone.” Because this couldn’t go on much longer, Jeanne brought Hersz Nadel to Boechout, only a few days before the Gestapo arrested him over there. Why did she do so? Fogelman suggests that the fact that she was a (head) nurse, made her fall into the category of rescuers she called: “concerned professionalism – people such as doctors or social workers who held jobs in which helping was a natural and logical extension.” (1994: 159) “These professionals saw what they were accustomed to seeing day in and day out: clients in trouble, patients in need, strangers in distress in a foreign land. To concerned professionals, Jews were similar to those who customarily crowded into their offices, jammed their waiting rooms, or milled about their anterooms. To be sure, Nazi persecution made their cases more urgent. But these professionals were supremely confident in their ability to help. It was what they were trained to do. Thus, the rescuer selves that emerged from this group’s helping activities were little different from their usual professional demeanours. They were competent, independent, and dedicated to doing their jobs well. They were also a bit aloof, keeping an emotional distance between themselves and their charges. They did not maintain relationships with those they rescued, and the people they helped most often did not provide testimony for recognition at Yad Vashem.” (Fogelman, 1994: 193, 194)
“Among all the groups, concerned professionals had the most seamless transition from rescuer to civilian life... Those who were social workers, nurses, doctors, teachers, and psychologists during the war continued to be the same afterward. Their professional identities, of which their rescuer self was a part, remained intact.” (Fogelman, 1994: 292)
Jeanne was also the one to warn her sister Julia, that she had heard people talk about a Jewish child the Germans hadn’t found (yet) when they had arrested Klaas, and that now it was becoming too dangerous to keep Sylvieke with her, because too many people knew. This was when Julia realised that something had to be done, and at last she decided to accept an earlier offer from Truus Van Buuren and her husband Henri Rooze to help her.
Her daughter Gwyneth wrote to me: “What was my mother like? My cousin Marnix [Sluys] visited us in 1996, the last full year of my mother's life; and though she was feeling ill most of the time he could sense her character: ‘To me,’ he said, ‘she is a chief, while my mother (Julia) is an Indian’. In other words, my mother was a leader, expecting immediate obedience from her children and I suppose from her students as well. She was religious, belonging to the Christian Reformed Church; she raised us in this church, my father attending as well, although in West-Michigan, this is a denomination founded and dominated by Dutch immigrants and their descendents. Life was difficult for us, for her, financially and emotionally. During my teenage years, she was often angry, depressed. She went back to nursing around 1963, when her son John was 5 years old, and in school. She worked the night shift as a registered nurse supervisor, finishing her working years at Pine Rest Hospital, a psychiatric facility. She was a teacher for licensed practical nurses (at Pine Rest) during the last of her working years, retiring in 1975. I believe she found some peace when she was established in her work at Pine Rest hospital, especially during her time teaching nursing students. Remember, she was a woman in her 50's raising teenage daughters, and a young son - we children were born from the time she was 35 to age 44. I think the best years for her and my father were the years they were retired; they were able to make several trips to Europe, to both her family and my father's.”
4.1.4.3 The granddaughter: Julia Schuyten and her husband, Klaas Sluys
Julia was Henri Schuyten and his wife Margriet’s second daughter, and Médard Schuyten’s granddaughter. In 1937, being a Protestant, she married the Dutch immigrant, Klaas Sluys, whom she met in the youth club of the Reformed Church in the Sanderusstraat Antwerp, of which both were active members. Their firstborn was Dora (°1938) followed by Jan (°1940) and Herman (°1941). After the war another four children would see the light.
Klaas was born in Holland. His parents were hard working and religious people. Although Klaas was a very hard-working pupil at the Christian primary school, at the age of twelve his rigid and severe father wanted him to help on the farm. From the age of fourteen he regularly fell ill and got one kidney infection after another. These confined him to bed, where he embarked on a self-study of business and accountancy. It was the humid and marshy climate that repeatedly made him ill, but it was not until he was seventeen that a new doctor succeeded in convincing his father to let Klaas go to the secular city of Amsterdam. With a Hungarian partner, Klaas set up an interior decorating business for interior decoration. However, since they had recruited somebody who had worked in the same branch, but who’d been contractually forbidden to go and work for the competition, Klaas was taken into custody, and sentenced not to be in business for two years. He decided to go to London, but because he could not get a residence permit there, he left again and in 1935 arrived in Antwerp. He started Chemical Works, a chemical company which focused mainly on exports, even to Palestine. On November 19 1936 someone in the Public Security sector wrote a note to his director, Bekaert, suggesting Klaas’ immediate removal from Belgium, because this “would not be an economic loss for Belgium”. Klaas moved heaven and earth. His father-in-law, Henri, and even the Reverend Mr. Winter wrote a letter to plead for him. Because Julia, who owned 4/5 of the shares of the Chemical Works, of which Klaas was the director, decided to keep her Belgian nationality, in spite of her marriage with the Dutchman Klaas, administrator de Foy of Public Security asked the Minister of Economic Affairs and Internal Trade, “considering these new circumstances” to permit Klaas a time of probation and, for the time being, to suspend the measures for his expulsion. Neither his illness, nor his business problems broke Klaas; on the contrary, he had proved to have a lot of resilience and perseverance, and the character of a fighter and a survivor. “Many rescuers, I discovered, had suffered a recent loss of someone close to them or an incapacitating childhood illness which caused them to identify with the Jewish victims… I found that empathic responses were especially keen in those rescuers who had suffered a death or a significant personal loss of some sort in childhood. When pressed, a majority of rescuers I interviewed admitted to having undergone at least one such traumatic experience… The significant losses experienced by rescuers, however, did not necessarily have to be a death of someone close to them. The loss could be a separation from a parent, the loss of a home, or the temporary loss of freedom. Whatever the particular loss, the result was an increased sensitivity to the suffering of others.” (Fogelman, 1994: 136, 267)
Klaas made a successful businessman, who quickly understood the importance of good publicity and advertising, which he printed himself. One of his pre-war business relationships was Sigmund Hönig in Amsterdam, who was Jewish. When he and his family fled from Holland and got stranded in Belgium, Sigmund turned to one of the few people he knew in Belgium, his fellow-countryman, Klaas Sluys. But to Klaas all the other Jews were complete strangers.
As Jews were gradually deprived of all forms of employment and Gottfried Finkel, being a Jew, lost his job, Klaas, at the request of someone from another Protestant parish, helped the Finkel family by giving Gottfried Finkel a night job in his own factory. It provided the Finkels with an important source of income. When the raids started in August 1942, Gottfried asked to hide his father, mother and sister. Klaas organized hiding places. Almost at the same time, Sigmund Hönig and his family, enlarged with Heinz Schindler and Anna Hönig Kron, in turn asked for help and refuge. A direct encounter with a distressed Jew (Finkel, Hönig…) had a great impact on people’s lives. Fogelman cites research on the ‘foot-in-the-door effect’ that demonstrated that ‘when people are asked for a small favour and comply they are more likely to agree later to a larger favour.’ (150) (Blumenthal: 80) And this is exactly what happened, because shortly afterwards, Myriam Reichman Grosz, who lived in the same building Lange Leemstraat 413 as the family Finkel, her three children, her little niece, Sylvieke, and Sylvieke’s grandmother, Dobe Thaler Grunspan also asked for refuge. Klaas and Julia saw a need, found an opportunity, and acted. Their sense of responsibility toward others probably emerged from internalized standards of appropriate conduct. The only two who had a business relationship, were Klaas and Sigmund Hönig.
Most rescuers acknowledge that the initial act of such behaviour was not premeditated and planned. Whether gradual or sudden, there was little mulling over of the moral dilemmas, conflicts, and life and death consequences involved in the decision to help. The decision to harbour Jews in extremis was often an impulsive response to an immediate situation – the reflection of an integrated self.” (Fogelman, 1998: 663) “[A]id to Jews often began in a spontaneous, unpremeditated way [except for the demand by another Protestant for work for Gottfried Finkel]. Indeed, studies revealed that in the case of 76 percent of the Jewish survivors the aid they received had been given without prior planning, thus underscoring the rescuers’ need to stand up for the poor and helpless. So strong was this need, so much a part of their makeup, that it overshadowed other considerations [like the fact they themselves had several little children]. When asked why they had saved Jews, the rescuers overwhelmingly emphasized that they had responded to the persecution and the suffering of victims and not to their Jewishness. What compelled them to act was injustice and not the people themselves. The ability to disregard all attributes of the needy, except their helplessness and dependence, is what I refer to as universalistic perception. Evidence of this perception comes from a variety of sources. One of them is the finding that 95 percent of the rescuers felt they were prompted to help by the need of the Jews.” (Tec, 1998: 655). Asked about her parents’ motivation to hide Jews, Dora Sluys answered: “At first I think because it just came on their way. And also a bit because of the attitude Jesus teaches us: ‘If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. [Matthew 5: 41]’ Saying ‘No’ would have demanded a greater moral effort, then saying ‘Yes’… And my father had a very strong developed sense of justice too. And compassion too played a role. My father knew, from his own experience, what it meant to be destitute and to be a stranger; and my mother was born in 1914 in Gouda when her parents were on the run.”
Klaas, being a combination of a businessman and a charismatic religious leader, was a perfect actor, capable of making and implementing plans and willing to accept the consequences. He wanted to affect events. Everything we know about Klaas makes us conclude that he must have been someone who saw himself as decisive, able to take responsibility, independent, and inclined towards adventurousness and taking of risks. His business was already going international. “Rescuers were no fools; nor were they suicidal. They were not about to offer help unless they felt there was a very good chance that they could pull it off. They needed to have faith in their capacity to assess situations and find solutions, not just in their ability to out-smart the Nazis. There was seldom time for measured thought. There was only time for a quick assessment of self and situation. It was very difficult. There were scores of unknowns. No one knew how long the war would last or, until the end, who would win.” (Fogelman, 1994, 59) Circumstances that may have facilitated rescue were information and comprehension of the need. Klaas was already well informed before the war, and during the war he continued to listen to the B.B.C. He had the actual ability to help: he had material and financial resources forthcoming from his activities as the successful proprietor of a medium-sized business, he could provide appropriate shelter or a reasonably safe hideout on the upper floor of his large house with many rooms for example, he had the support of other Protestants and an informal network that supported him. Some Jews, like Sigmund Hönig, had their own resources – money or personal items of value like diamonds – but rescuers like Klaas were scrupulous in taking no more than was necessary for sustenance. Klaas dipped into his own resources, at times quite heavily. “Während der ganzen Zeit versorgte er die Familie mit Geld und Lebensmitteln. Die letzteren beschaffte er teils auf Rationierungsmarken, die ihm angeblich von 3. Seite durch die Post zugesandt wurden, und teils auf den schwarzen Markt. Insgesamt gab der Angeklagte der Familie Gross ungefähr 16.000 Frank. Eine Quittung liess er sich nicht über diese Beträge geben... Die Frau Gross soll ihm versprochen haben, das Geld nach Beendigung des Krieges zurückzuzahlen.” The burden eased if the hidden Jews, like Sigmund Hönig, had their own resources, but only so until these ran out. In the financial balances of Klaas’ factory, Chemical Works, at the end of the years 1944 and 1945, we can see that Klaas lent money to Myriam Grosz Reichman (31,203,60 Bfr. Currently about € 19,500); Dobe Thaler (85,732,95 Bfr. Currently € 35,500) and to Sigmund Hönig (376,338,03 Bfr. Currently € 235,000). Myriam didn’t return from Auschwitz, nor did her husband, so this loan couldn’t be paid back anymore. Dobe Thaler had no means to pay back Klaas, so he decided to remit the loan. Sigmund, after the war, paid everything back within a year. For him, this was a question of honour. Money ‘greased’ the whole enterprise. Outside sources sometimes supplied it. Klaas got ration stamps sent by post from three different sources. We couldn’t find out who was sending them. Finding shelters, where Jews could maintain an “underground” existence, became a major preoccupation for rescuers like Klaas (and René). Sometimes apartments were rented (under false names) to shelter Jews. In the sentence of Klaas we can read: “Der Angeklagte nahm die Familie im September 14 Tage in seine Wohnung auf. Dann brachte er sie bis zum 15-1-1943 in eine von ihm gemietete Wohnung in Boechout, Hovesteenweg. Vom 15–30-1-1943, dem Tage der Verhaftung des Angeklagten, behergbergte er sie wieder in seiner Wohnung, weil sie im Hovesteenweg räumen musste[n]. Dies geschah, um die Familie GROSS zu verbergen.” The demand for shelters was consistently higher than the supply. Only a few people were willing to provide them; some [like John Polderman and his Lea] would consent for a short period only. Ultimately, most rescuers faced the necessity of providing shelter in their own homes. The home of Klaas and Julia served as a way station for transients moving from one shelter to another. The reason was that with the employees working in the factory, the risk of being discovered was far too big.
His being asked for help by the victim himself (Hönig) or by an intermediary acting on the victim’s behalf (a member of the Protestant church in Bexstraat Antwerp, acting for Finkel.), was the deciding factor in producing a rescue response. “Once they agreed, rescuers found themselves experiencing the “foot in the door” phenomenon. Those they helped brought or sent others. Finkel asked Klaas for help for his parents; afterwards he probably did the same for Myriam Grosz-Reichman, who probably asked Klaas to help her little cousin Sylvieke and her grandmother too. “Without resources, support, and stamina one could not act – no matter how much one saw and how responsible one felt. This is the essence of why a personality test can never accurately predict who will or will not become a rescuer. Action may come from the core of the self, but it is inhibited or reinforced by situational factors. Our case studies illustrate that only when an aware person, with feelings of responsibility, was in a situation that provided necessary resources was it possible for that person to act,“ says Fogelman correctly (1994: 66) And Klaas and Julia were such a couple. “The emotional support that these couples provided for each other was critical in sustaining their commitment to their charges. They helped each other through frightening times and drew courage from one another.” (Fogelman, 1994: 142) In 1997 at the request of Edith Hönig, Klaas (posthumously) and Julia were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Ones.
We have enough information about Klaas and Julia, (and equally about Henri and Margriet; Henri and Truus) to claim with certainty that they had integrated into their lives the value of commitment to actively protect or enhance the well-being of others, into their lives well before the war began – and remained committed to them long after it ended. They had a “rescuer self”, as Fogelman describes it:
“[T]hat was and, over the years has continued to be, an integral part of their identity… A core confidence, a strong sense of self, and a supportive situation had allowed bystanders to undertake the rescue. But once the decision to help had been reached and the rescue had begun, a different self – a rescuer self – emerged, to do what had to be done and to keep rescuers from becoming overwhelmed by new responsibilities and pressures. A ‘transformation’ had taken place. It was not simply their behaviour that changed. Successful rescuers became, in effect different people… The rescuer self had to be competent, resourceful, and practical in order to get through each day safely. Their charges had to eat, and food shopping was a major problem. To avoid arousing suspicion by buying too much food at once, rescuers wandered far afield… In rural villages, the daily chore of finding food and other basic necessities for those in hiding was nearly a full-time job… The rescuer self always had to be alert… Rescuers constantly scanned their homes for any details that might be out of character… the actions of rescuers were consistent with their moral beliefs, identities, feelings, and attitudes… The rescuer self emerged from the essential nature of the individual, very much a natural development of temperament and experience… In the main, rescuing was not glamorous or filled with dramatic moments of valour. Rather, it was a tedious, enervating job, more like an assembly-line worker’s duties than a movie star’s. They did no know it would end. Many rescuers described their weariness from endless days of deception and anxiety. Yet most did not abandon their charges. Most were tenacious in their determination to help… the weight of total responsibility for one’s own life and those of others was among the exigencies of the rescuer situation. The loneliness of this position was unrelenting because of its voluntary nature: every rescuer made a conscious decision to place himself or herself in harm’s way. Because the decision could be rescinded at any time, one’s life was entirely in one’s own hands… Rescuing relationships were subject to internal and external forces which could nurture or challenge them, make them seem worthwhile or unreasonably burdensome. The theme of the rescuing relationship was altruism; its product, the creation of a safe harbour in a hostile world. Its basic ‘contract’ was this: the rescuer committed to harbouring a Jew – to take care of his daily needs, to warn him of danger, to maintain a façade of ‘normal life’ behind which the Jew would be safe. The Jew was dependent, but was expected to cooperate – making as little trouble as possible, using personal resources to help out in daily life, and staying relatively invisible.” (Fogelman, 1994: xviii, 68, 69, 75, 78, 80, 82-83, 86, 135)
“Among the rescuers, religious-moral rescuers had little difficulty integrating their rescuer selves into postwar life. They continued to live out their days according to the same Christian principles of compassion and charity they had exhibited during the war.” (Fogelman, 1994: 289) And we know that this also applied for Klaas and Julia. We found evidence that even after the war Klaas was ready to help those Jews who needed help. On July 4 1946 he accompanied Lily Hönig when she returned to Holland, three months after her parents had gone back to Amsterdam, and he helped Dobe Thaler (financially) to allow her to emigrate to the United States. Dora Sluys writes: “As I remember it, my mother never took the initiative. My father brought along tramps, dismissed prisoners, priests who had left the Roman Catholic Church or stateless Eastern Europeans, and my mother took care of them.”
Was there a gender difference in rescuing behaviour? “To men, the first term [morality of principle] is assigned; to woman, the second [morality of sympathy]. To men, then, the world of work, politics an public affairs, heroic virtues, and the morality of principles; to women, the domain of human relations, the private sphere, ordinary virtues, and the morality of sympathy. But just as human biological life needs men and women to maintain itself, so, too, life in society requires the interaction of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ values. The opposing terms (and the values attached to them) don’t tend to be equally appreciated; typically, preference is accorded to the masculine values, so much so that at certain times in history these are the only values recognized. Private life, conversation, caring, and compassion, being ‘left’ to women, are treated as though unworthy of philosophical or moral reflection.” (Todorov: 293-294) “Fifty years ago, most women [like Julia] were full-time housewives and mothers… [F]or the most part, women undertook or were assigned rescue tasks that centered on their household and child-rearing skills. At home, women took responsibility for the people they were hiding. It was difficult work. Quarters were often cramped, nerves frayed, and hunger constant. Each simple task, from hanging out laundry to emptying chamber pots, contained the possibility that someone would spot something suspicious and report it to the authorities. It was left to one member of the household to keep things running and to keep people’s spirits up in the process. That job usually fell to the woman of the house.” (Fogelman, 1994: 248) “[W]ords and phrases characterizing care – the need to be helpful, hospitable, concerned, and loving – were voiced significantly more often by rescuers as they recalled the values they learned from their parents or other most influential person.” (Oliner & Oliner: 164) Julia had the role model of her hospitable parents. When Julia, knowing that her husband was going to be arrested, quickly packed a lunch with slices of bread for the “poor” Jews who’d been found and arrested, this was an act of kindness and an expression of sympathy and respect for victims, which “showed the victims that they were still cared for and respected as members of the human community… an act of resistance to this onslaught and an expression of protest against the immoral ideology upon which it was based”. (Jones: 209, 211) “[E]mpathy – the feeling for the other – evokes the altruistic and not the egoistic response… The evidence from the historians supports the centrality of empathy in prosocial activism. The Oliners, in their three-fold category of rescuers, enumerate those who are ‘empathically oriented’”. About this group they write: ‘An empathic orientation is centered on the needs of another, on that individual’s possible fate. It emerges out of a direct connection with the distressed other. Compassion, sympathy, and pity are its characteristic expressions. The reactions may be emotional or cognitive; frequently they contain both (189).’ (Blumenthal: 73-74) But certainly in one particular moment, – when Klaas was asked by one of the Sipo-SD members how many children they had, and Julia quickly answered: four – Julia is the one that, with an almost reflexive response saved Sylvieke’s life. Julia had no time for reflection, but acted seemingly impulsively out of an internal compulsion. “No matter when or where rescue takes place, the pattern of rescuing is the same. Awareness of dehumanization sets the process in motion when the condition is seen to warrant intervention. Personality and the situation converge, to act or not to act, in response to the need to save a life. Time is often of the essence in extreme situations. The decision to risk one’s life happens quickly, coming from an inner core that automatically calculates the changes of success.” (Fogelman, 1994: 314, 315) “The power that had taken over their lives was awesome and could indeed control much of their behaviour – but not all of it. Deception was a fundamental tool for undermining that power; it was a way for the self to assert its own will. Used in the service of saving lives, rescuers had no doubt or hesitancy regarding its appropriateness.” (Oliner & Oliner: 112) At his trial before the Kriegsgericht Klaas was under oath, and for a religious man like him it was a very difficult thing to lie about the number of children he had, but when he was questioned about it and had to answer immediately which he did - in order to save Sylvieke’s life. The Oliners observe: “This internal sense of compulsion was characteristically so strong that most rescuers reported rarely reflecting before acting. Asked how long it took them to make their first helping decision, more then 70 percent indicated ‘minutes.’ Asked if they consulted with anyone prior to making the decision, 80 percent responded ‘no one’” (169).
4.1.4.4 The grandson: René Schuyten and his fiancée/wife Nelly Opstelten
There are more than 500 pages of (love)letters between René and Nelly from September 14 1938 until May 11 1948. Their daughter, Margareth Schuyten, was so kind to let me read them. From them we got a pretty good picture of both parents. René was a physically strong, intelligent, brave and undertaking young man. During his military service in 1938, John Polderman, being a Protestant from Antwerp just like himself, became his best friend. René is not so religious as his brother-in-law, Klaas, or as his fiancée Nelly. He doesn’t pray much. And for that time period he thinks very ecumenically: “I don’t think there is a difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant people as long as they believe in Him.” And he has some critique versus his own Reformed Church too: “The basic principle is: We are sinners, guilty until we die, and Christ has redeemed us and we believe that. For the rest everybody is committed to his own conscience and amount of intellect. If anyone worshipped God in a Roman Catholic church, at home or in the army, that wouldn’t matter if only he believes in Him. Perhaps someone might say: ‘You’re modern.’ First let me tell you this, that I don’t know what it means to be ‘modern’. One thing I do know: In Belgium, there are people who believe, and people who don’t. Of those who believe I’ve met some among Roman Catholics, and others were Reformed Christians or belonged to other Protestant sects, and I have seen that faith was the same in all of them; the only difference being that one person was intellectually more educated than the other, and that one had other ideas about inessentials than the other. The intellect of all of us is handicapped and we all can err. The main thing always is not to believe in a Church, but to believe in God… Because I see things in the Reformed Church too that aren’t right, I can’t do Confession [of Faith to become a full member of the Church].”
When he is joining the army, he regularly dares to leave the military barracks in the evening. At the end of May 1939 he leaves the army and returns home and in August 1939 Nelly and René eventually get engaged. When Hitler invades Poland in September 1939, René is mobilised immediately. From his letters speaks no interest in politics whatsoever. On May 9 1940, at a time when he hasn’t seen Nelly for six months, he starts writing a (war) diary, a valuable document that provides us with a good impression of how René deals with situations of crisis and acute stress. When on May 10 1940 the Germans invade Belgium, he quickly writes a short letter to Nelly: I promise you not to risk my life needlessly, but I shall do my duty. I know why. You are my homeland, and family is all the wealth I have. I see it as my duty to help defend that big treasure.” On the way back to Antwerp the Germans intern him in as a prisoner of war. He is shipped tot Stalag XC in Germany. Later on he has to work on the farm, where the food is good. Although he gets along with the German farmer, he has plans to escape, but before he can realise his plan, he is released in January 1941. In February 1942 he starts working at the Standaard bookshop for 1,200 Bfr. a month, which is not enough to support a family, not even with additional earnings from binding books, setting up a library and tanning rabbit skins. In a letter of September 1942 – the Jews are rounded up in Antwerp in one raid after the other, and they desperately are trying to find a hiding place – he suddenly gets a ‘splendid’ idea: “We will rent a house, a big house with a big garden; a house with at least one floor and with 1000 m2 of land behind it. With a lot of fruit trees and enough room to raise a complete school of children. In that house we’ll live… We will take in boarders. Do you get it? Yes? My brave little woman! Do you agree with a simple wedding feast in 6 to 8 weeks? Do you want to cook for four instead of two? But we are not yet so far. This evening I’m going to talk with Klaas, because he has to find some friends who are willing to cooperate. At present he doesn’t know anything about it yet. There is nearly no risk for failure, unless there are no takers, but most likely there will be… PS If you don’t like the idea, something I would understand, then say so right away, for I’ll start and won’t be stopped anymore.” And although Nelly has a lot of practical questions, she also sees this window of opportunity to marry and writes back: “Yes, I will!” When she writes: “These people have no ration card for coal,” she must have understood that the boarders would be Jews. “With our ration of coal, we will hardly have enough for one stove. What will we do then? Have these people with us, every evening? Then I firmly protest against this idea, and in that case I’d rather wait another year, because that way, I wouldn’t be able to be happy if there were always strangers around.” Then René writes back, that he has discussed his plan with Klaas, who found it an excellent plan which can readily be carried out. “Father and mother – what a pitty! – see a lot of difficulties, especially from a financial point of view.” He immediately starts looking for a house. As there are so many Jews who are trying to hide, he is very confident that he can find a couple of boarders that can and will be prepared to pay the board of 12,000 Bfr. (currently € 7,500) a month. Apparently Sigmund Hönig was wealthy enough to do so, at least for a few months, and this is something he presumably already knew when in an important letter of October 1 1942 he tries to assure Nelly that everything is well thought-out. This letter is a quite unique document, because it contains a complete business plan with a very precise calculation of all expected receipts and expenditures. For each question of Nelly, he has an answer: “Where does the furniture come from?” And he answers: “with our own furniture for ourselves and with the furniture our guests will bring with them. Where do we get the sheets and blankets for five persons [perhaps including Lily Hönig too]? We will buy them with the 10,000 Bfr. (currently € 6,250) I will get from my father [as capital to start with] and from the others: as I already said above. Where do we get the money to marry from? From the same 10,000 Bfr. also. How do we get food supplies? From my ration to start with, and what we buy for the winter on the black market. Do these people always have to be with us? These people stay where they are, namely upstairs, except when we wish not to be alone. For the moment that is enough. Yesterday I was with Klaas. Our income will be: 12,000 Bfr. from the board, 1,200 Bfr. salary [from the bookshop] and 800 Bfr. from the furs, all in all 14,000 Bfr. Of this we will use:
2,400 franks for 8 kilos of butter at 300 franks
2,100 franks for seven ration cards for bread at 300 franks
600 franks for two ration cards for bread at 300 franks for ourselves
200 franks for 4 ration cards for meat at 50 franks
300 franks for the price of the meat
960 franks for 120 kilos of potatoes at 8 franks per kilo
300 franks for one kilo of fat
340 franks for four kilos of sugar at 85 franks
300 franks for 12 pots of jam at 35 franks
500 franks for vegetables
200 franks for 30 ration stamps for milk
450 franks for fruit at 15 franks per day
150 franks for 1 kilo of soap
75 franks for light
350 franks for heating (counted at 12 months per year )
[9,225 franks for All in all, but than René has not calculated in the rent for the house yet. On October 5, he sees an isolated villa in Edegem. Rent: 450 franks per month.]
René works like a madman to get everything done as soon as possible. Houses [that are suited and available] are “very, very, very, very scarce.”
Nelly Opstelten was born into a Reformed family. At the age of 10 she loses her mother and a year later she is sent to her sister Ditty in Antwerp. When her father remarries, she goes back to Holland, but the relationship with her stepmother worsens so drastically that on June 10 1935 she returns to Belgium to work as a maid in her sister Ditty’s household. Nelly meets René in church and during catechism. She admires his guts, they fall in love, but they keep it a secret. In March 1939 her sister discovers this relationship, and sends Nelly back to her father in Holland. René writes to Nelly’s father, asks the reverend to intervene, and the conclusion is that she may return, but this time not to her sister Ditty. She works as a maid, attends catechism, and in a letter to René she mentions that several Jews are following catechism. On June 7 1939 she writes to René: “Catechism was very dull, Kramer wasn’t there, but four other Jews were. Today is more Catechism of Jews than something else. But when you are here again, I’ll probably like it again.” (Kramer was a Jewish refugee from Germany or Austria, an intellectual who had already got a stipend from a Protestant Fund before the war, to which Henri Schuyten paid, with a number of other Protestants. Kramer was a regular guest at Henri and Margriet’s table.) On August 18 1939 they get engaged, but two weeks later René is mobilised. Nelly looses her job, and she returns to Holland to her sister Coby and her husband in Scheveningen. Because they expect that René will get a brief furlough of five days, she makes a trip to Belgium on May 10 1940. That day the war breaks out, and in such circumstances, she is not welcome with Klaas and Julia, but she will find shelter with René’s parents, Henri and Margriet. René is made a prisoner of war. With more than a year of separation, they wouldn’t see each other until in January 1941. In her letters she also writes about herself being “quite forgetful, reckless, affected, weak, silly, childish and a bad girl.” René writes to her that she’s still young, impulsive and a bit of a blabber, easy to influence and very uncertain. Physically she is not so strong, very often she looks pale, and she doesn’t eat enough, and gets easily irritated. But to be a rescuer it takes someone that is immune to stress, and Nelly definitely isn’t immune to stress, on the contrary. Nelly was a good example of someone who must have been too fearful, too nervous to develop such a real rescuer self. Her husband however was the right type, though at the beginning, he had not the means and resources needed to hide Jews, nor a house (yet). It was not until René got the resources that he could hide Jews. From the letters between René and Nelly we concluded that their plan made it possible for them to marry at last, and that this prospect was the driving force to hide Jews, not the motive of gain. The money from Sigmund Hönig provided them with the means to start a household, something for which René and Nelly had been desperately longing for for so long; the board was not a goal in itself. On October 18 1942, a month before she marries, she hears from a colleague of the castle where she works as a maid-servant, that the Germans in Brussels had been searching every room of the apartments, looking for Jews. This frightens her perhaps, but it doesn’t mean that she is not willing anymore to continue with René’s plan. For Nelly, although she must have been very frightened and her stamina may not have been so strong at all, wanted to marry so badly, that she forgot her fear, certainly for a while. Having the financial resources, they could rent a house to hide Jews. Without the resources, they couldn’t have done it.
Shortly after their marriage, René and Nelly hid Sigmund Hönig and his wife for a few months, from November 20 1942 and probably until the beginning of February 1943, when Klaas was arrested, and René took his place as the coordinator of help to the hidden Jews. After the arrest of Klaas, it became too dangerous to hide Jews. So René moved the Hönigs to Isidoor “Door” Hendrickx. Julia couldn’t do it, because she was too busy taking care for her three children and Sylvieke (until May 1943), and writing, making packages and visiting Klaas in prison. Julia writes: “René didn’t bother me with anything [about the coordination of help].” Now he was responsible for it, certainly until the arrest of Charles Hendrickx, Door Hendrickx and his wife Philomena Coenen. He was the one who was in charge, and he visited the Jews with Hendrickx to cheer them up a bit. Afterwards, he and Julia certainly continued to look after Dobe Thaler, but after they had to flee from their hiding place with the Hendrickx family, the Finkel, Hönig, and Gross families, Anne Hönig Kron and Heinz Schindler seemed to have found some other help than René’s. The Jewish dentist Otto Hutterer, a relative of Heinz Schindler, managed to rent an apartment for them in Brussels. It is possible that René, one way or another, continued to supply them with money from Klaas and Julia, and with ration stamps…
In 1989 Nelly tells her daughter Margaret: “After some time, all the friends who had hidden Jews were becoming afraid because Klaas Sluys and [Door and Charles] Hendrickx were German prisoners, so they [other Protestants] did not want to keep the Jews anymore.” And I think that for Nelly herself, the strain must have been too much to bear, and that she therefore also asked René not to hide Jews anymore. But we know also that for quite some time, they hid young Eduard Hendrickx, Door and Phylomena’s youngest son, from the moment (on March 19 1943) of the arrest of his parents. How long Eduard stayed with them, I couldn’t find out. How they managed to survive financially without the boarders, we don’t know, but it is possible that Klaas gave Julia permission to grant them a loan. Klaas’ financial balances at the end of 1944 show a loan of 15,225 Bfr. (currently € 9500) on René’s name, and a loan of 50,750 Bfr. (currently € 32,000) on the name of Perfumery Isis. With this money René indeed was able to start a perfumery in Edegem. This could explain how they managed it.
In October 1951 René and Nelly with their three children emigrated to the United States, to work in a division of Klaas’ factory. Afterwards he became an editor of school books. On October 8 1975 as René got killed under his tractor, trying to drag away a tree.
4.1.5 The co-religionist helpers and rescuers
4.1.5.1 The son: Charles Hendrickx and his wife Yvonne Noë
Charles Hendrickx, a workman-fitter, was married to Yvonne Noë. They had two children. They too belonged to the Reformed Church, Sanderusstraat, Antwerp. Charles Hendrickx (and his brother Eduard) were members of the youth club of that church. They were the youngest ones, but this way they got to know Klaas, Julia, Jeanne and Toine Rooze. They were all in their twenties, whereas the Hendrickx brothers were at least eight years younger.
We know that during several months they hid Karin Bremer for several months; and her two year-old daughter, Sophia Bremer; Jonas Polak; and Rosalie Berlstein. Rosalie’s husband, Igo Gross, arrived just a few days before the raid on March 13 1943. Charles turned himself in, after his wife had been threatened with arrest by Lauterborn and Debra. At the Sipo-SD headquarters, he is confronted with Polak, Gross and Karin Bremer, and questioned by Holm and Debra in a brutal way, because the interrogators wanted to know if their parents also were hiding Jews. He is tried and sentenced to ten months imprisonment. After a few months, he is sent to France to work on the construction of the Atlantic Wall, which is carried out by the so called Organisation Todt. On December 2 1943, he and his father managed to escape and they go into hiding in the village they had come from.
On January 27 1949 he petitions the second Commission of Acceptance for Political Prisoners and their rightful claimants, to be acknowledged as a political prisoner, and for the benefits attached to this status. He bases his demand on the fact that he was arrested for hiding Jews. After having heard witnesses (Polak, Berlstein, Gross?) the commission decides not to grant him the status, nor the status of Political Prisoner “because article 5, 5° of the law of February 26 1947 says that persons who were arrested for acts done from motives of gain” are excluded from it. But Charles doesn’t give up. On January 1 1952 he tries to get recognition as a member of the civil resistance, and again his motivation is the hiding of Jews. This Commission says he has no right to this title because he “apparently acted from motives of gain. The hunted-down ones paid him 150 Bfr. per person per day (currently about € 100 today). Therefore he did not act out of patriotism nor with the purpose to fight against the occupier.” Charles tries a last time to get recognized as someone who refuses to carry out compulsory work for the Germans. He doesn’t get this recognition either because it is not proven that upon his arrest, he already had received such a summons [for the Arbeidseinsatz], with which he had not complied.”
Was there any monetary compensation or material reward over and above expenses the non-Jews received when hiding Jews? “One way of bringing the noninstrumental values of kindness and resistance into sharp relief is to view them in light of the not inconsiderable number of people who rescued victims only for pay. (These purely mercenary rescuers must be kept distinct from those who asked the Jews whom they hid for money because they were so poor that they could not have afforded to keep them otherwise.) Acts of rescue that were motivated only by monetary reward would nevertheless have very great instrumental value for victims, of course, but they had no value to them either as expressions of respect, recognition, and human solidarity, or as acts expressing protest against Nazi oppression.” (Jones: 212-213) Nechama Tec calls them paid helpers, not rescuers:
“Do these who saved Jews for profit alone belong to the category of rescuers? Yes and no. After all, some of these profit-seeking individuals did save lives. They exposed themselves to the same danger as the altruistic rescuers… And yet, we feel uneasy placing them in the same category with the selfless saviours. I refer to them instead as paid helpers, not rescuers. Included in this category are Christians who would not have offered aid without payment. This category contrasts with cases in which payment was accepted but was not the main reason for offering protection. Beyond their desire for financial gain, what else do we know about the paid helpers? Information about them comes only from Jewish survivors. Christians who saved Jews solely for money refuse to identify themselves as Jewish protectors. Those few who have been identified do not discuss wartime experiences in terms of aid to Jews. None wrote wartime memoirs that describe their help to Jews. Nor did they testify before the many post war historical commissions that were collecting information. Because of this reluctance, Jewish accounts are the sole, indirect source of information about them. From this information I learned that paid helpers differ from the rest of Christian rescuers in a variety of ways. Only a few of the paid helpers were individualists. While a substantial proportion of them were independent, none were guided by moral imperatives that required them to stand up for the needy. Whether propelled by hunger or greed, paid helpers were motivated by the desire for tangible rewards; their commitment to the protection of Jews was weak and could easily be terminated by external threats.“ (Tec, 1998, 656).
Charles and Door Hendrickx and their wives therefore fall under the ‘nonaltruistic’ category. As far as we know, for them, it was a strictly commercial arrangement. Charles’ daughter, Liliane Hendrickx, didn’t want to cooperate anymore after having read Edith Hönig’s story, where she says that they [Charles and Door Hendrickx] required a high price for the hiding, but that, considering the risk they took, they [Sigmund Hönig and the other Jews] found it reasonable. Because of Liliane’s regrettable decision, we were not able to gather other elements of information that might have given another, more subtle distinction between individual behaviour and choices they made, especially between the different roles of the four different people involved: Charles and Yvonne, Door and Philomena. Liliane said to me: “I know my parents and my grandparents. They never would have done such a thing.” It is obvious: the truth may hurt.
4.1.5.2 The father: Door Hendrickx and his wife Philomena Coene
Door Hendrickx, dairy merchant (milk, cheese…) was married to Philomena Coene. They already had been hiding Gottfried Finkel from August 1942 already until on March 13 1943. They also hid his parents and his sister, but we don’t know the time period. When on October 20 1942, Myriam Reichman Grosz, her three children, Dobe Thaler and Sylvieke come to Klaas, he asks Door to take in Heinz Schindler, Anna Hönig Kron, Edith and Lily Hönig. After the arrest of Klaas on January 31 1943, René must have asked Door to take in Sigmund Hönig and his wife as well. This means that as of March 13 1943 Door and his wife hide 10 Jews, who pay him 150 Bfr. per person a day, totalling 45,000 Bfr. (currently € 28,000) a month.
Lauterborn and Debra try to arrest Henrickx’ youngest son, Eduard, seventeen years old, at the Werbestelle, the office where younger boys had to go to, to be (or not to be) exempted from Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work in Germany. But he doesn’t show up there. On his way home, the neighbours warned him not to go inside. Thus he found refuge with René and Nelly. Eduard and René broke into in the house of Door Hendrickx, which had been taped up by the Germans, to collect the Jews’ belongings. In 1994 Nelly says: “So René and the boy broke into the house, across the roof and through an attic window and got the belongings out.” Unfortunately Eduard died in 2004, so we no longer could ask him for additional information about his brother and his parents. “They had a daughter too; Angèle, who at the time was expecting her first child. She lived elsewhere, but came daily to the shop, where butter and other dairy products were sold,” Edith Hönig still remembers.
Door gets a heavier sentence (18 months) than his son (10 months). We do not know why. They have enough courage to escape and they go into hiding in Geel. Door’s wife, Philomena Coene is released from prison on September 3 1943, and she returns home.
At Debra’s trial, Door Hendrickx is a plaintiff, who lodges a claim for compensation of 30,000 Bfr. (currently € 18,750). He says that Lauterborn and Debra stole it from his house. Just like his son Charles, Door also asks for the status of political prisoner, and for the profits attached to this status, his request is motivated on the fact that he was arrested for giving shelter to Jews. But for the same reasons as in Charles’ case, his petition is rejected.
4.1.5.3 John Polderman and his wife Lea
We know very little about John Polderman. We know that he was René’s best friend and Nelly’s too. He was married to Lea. Edith Hönig confirmed that shortly after August 10 1942 and before November 20 1942 – the day that Sigmund Hönig and his wife moved in with René and Nelly – John and Lea hid Edith’s parents for a short time. René’s brother Wim says in a letter: “I know they were in contact with each other throughout the war years… What little I know of him is, that he married a friend of my sister Jeanne. She was a nurse by the name of ‘Lea’”. On November 27 1944, John Polderman is killed by a V2 at the intersection of Keyserlei and Frankrijklei, together with 128 other civilians and 29 British soldiers. 209 civilians and 52 soldiers were wounded. René writes to Nelly to tell her the terrible news. René stayed in Antwerp, while the pregnant Nelly fled to Oudenaarde together with her little son Peter, and accompanied by Julia and her three children, out for fear of the V1 and V2 that the Germans launched on the port of Antwerp. René and Toine Rooze helped Lea with the funeral. A day later another bomb completely destroys the business of John and Toine. René, who lives with his parents, offers Lea his house in Edegem to live in until they (René and Nelly) would return or until a new (cheaper) house would have been found for her. Lea’s son dies, and she remarries after the war. Because nobody remembered her family name, we were unable to trace her (or her descendants).
4.1.5.4 Toine Rooze
Toine Rooze had a business with John Polderman. He was married to Jeanne Verbrugghe. “Some of the worst problems revolved around transporting children,” (Oliner & Oliner: 64) because little children sometimes react completely unpredictably, especially when they are in a situation or in the company of persons unfamiliar to them. On May 7 1943 Toine’s and Jeanne’s oldest son, Herbert, is born. Four days later, Toine brings three-and-a-half year old Sylvieke Reichman from Julia in Boechout to Henri Rooze and Truus van Buuren in Korbeek-Lo, near Louvain. Sylvie still remembers the traumatising scene when Julia hands her over to Toine, and Sylvieke doesn’t want to leave. Knowing that – perfectly understandably – Sylvieke found it emotionally difficult to separate from Julia, the transport to Korbeek-Lo involved a great risk for Toine Rooze.
Before the war, both Toine’s wife Jeanne and Truus van Buuren had founded the Protestant School in Malines, and Toine was a very good friend of René Schuyten and of John Polderman. It is possible that Bertus Rooze, Toine’s brother, was also involved in helping Jews, but up to now we have not been able to find a confirmation for what Wim Schuyten wrote to me: “There were also Antoine and Bertus Rooze, who were taking part.” I asked several children of Bertus Rooze, but they knew nothing about it.
“What distinguishes most actives ones who did respond [like Toine Rooze] from most rescuers is the degree of responsibility assumed and the length of time they persisted in their tasks. (Oliner & Oliner: 140) Toine was what they call an ‘active helper’.
4.1.5.5 Henri Rooze and his wife Truus Van Buuren
Henri Rooze was a civil engineer. He was married to the Dutch teacher, Truus van Buuren, who after their wedding became a housewife.
Henri came from a family with seven children living in Gent. He was the sixth child and the only one who was allowed to study. They were members of the Reformed Church in Gent. His mother died of the Spanish Flu when Henri was four years old. His father, a coal merchant, remarried his housekeeper, but she had an evil character, from which Henri suffered a lot. He received very little affection, and emotionally he shut himself in and became introverted. His father died when Henri was 20 years old. Henri was very fond of his father. Religiously Henri had a one-track mind and he was really orthodox. In his youth the opposition between Protestants and Roman Catholics was very heated, and it took him years before he judged the Catholic faith with more charity. Joop Rooze, one of his sons, wrote to me: “I think that the marriage to my mother saved him. They were a very good couple and as children we have never witnessed a fight between them. My mother was good at absorbing tensions and very often she had a good appreciation of the situation.
Truus was born in Leeuwarden in Holland in a very strict orthodox Calvinistic family. Her mother died from tuberculosis when she was only three years old. Her father remarried and they had two more children. He was a history teacher and afterwards he became the director of the Christian Teachers’ (Training) College in Leeuwarden. His oldest three daughters all get their teachers diploma. Her father was a man of strict values and standards, but also relatively critical and able to see things in perspective. The loss of her mother marked her for life; she was brought up by a stepmother who was “very doctrinal” and who gave her little affection. She was a woman who kept her distance and who had very little attention for children. Truus and her two sisters struggled to free themselves from this suffocating sphere. She applied for the job of teacher in the “School with the Bible” in Malines. She did it out of an inner urge for missionary work, out of conviction and/or idealism. She taught there for four years until she married Henri. Her faith, according to which the Jews were God’s chosen people, and her sense of justice made of her the driving force for the hiding of the Jews. Henri supported her in this in a positive, although less active way.
In May 1940 Henri was mobilised, and so he wasn’t at home when their house was destroyed by bombs on the second day of the war in Belgium, viz. on May 11 1940. Truus with her two children fled to Brussels where she found Henri back after the capitulation of the Belgian army. They rented a house in Korbeek-Lo were they stayed until 1947.
Henri and Truus were both Protestants of the Reformed Church and as soon as they heard that Jews had asked Julia and Klaas for refuge, they wrote them a letter, proposing to help them hiding Jews – if necessary.
On May 11 1943 Toine Rooze brought Sylvieke to them. We know the exact date from an interesting document that is dated 9th September 1944 issued by the municipality of Korbeek-Lo. It is an official information bulletin concerning foreigners (see attachment), containing very important information: It says that Sylvia Reichman stays with Rooze Henri Jan, Tienschesteenweg 207 in Korbeek-Lo. It gives the day of her arrival in town: May 11 1943. It says that Sylvia is Jewish and that her parents had been arrested in Antwerp about 2 years before. It contains a picture of a smiling Sylvieke and where the stranger normally puts his signature, it is Truus who signs with G.W.V.Rooze-v.Buuren, as “the person that houses the refugee.” This document was an important piece of evidence for Yad Vashem to recognize Henri and Truus as ‘Righteous Ones’.
At that time they were already hiding another Jewish girl. Her name was Josephine van Engel (°1935). Her parents had come to Antwerp during to war, but when the situation worsened; they managed to bring Josephine to the Roozes. Rescuers like Truus invented new identities for the Jews, because it was to dangerous to use their real names. They would present them as distant family members from Holland, staying with them because in Holland there wasn’t enough to eat. Josephine was called “Willemien”. Her mother was imprisoned and survived the war. When her mother came to pick up Josephine, Truus proposed that she stay until Holland was liberated. She accepted the offer. Josephine’s little sister was hidden in the surroundings of Hilversum and survived the war, but her father died in Bergen Belsen. After the war she married Jacob Huisman, and they had two sons. Unfortunately she died in 1993, only 58 years of age.
Truus and the others had taken particular pains to teach the little girl, Sylvieke her new identity. Sylvieke was called “zusje”, what means “little sister’. Many others Jews would follow. On February 1 1944 Sofie Vlessing (°1922) joined the family. They called her “aunt Fie”. On February 1 1944 they hear that the parents of Josephine are caught, and the same happens with the parents of Sofie on March 2.
On April 26 1944 Mr. and Mrs. Wesley joined the family coming from Maastricht, followed in the summer of 1944 by three other refugees, who said they jumped off a train: two children, called Leo and Adèle and their uncle. The Rooze children do not know their real names. All eight of them stayed with their rescuers and their four own children, together forming a household of fourteen people, until liberation day on September 5 1944. But before they were liberated they experienced some extremely scary moments: heavy bombings on April 26, May 1, May 12, May 13, May 25; they hear that in Holland, Annie van Buuren, Truus’s sister, has been arrested by the Germans on June 4; at the end of June a completely unexpected visit by Feldgendarmen, because the windows were not darkened well enough; and very heavy fighting in the area and around their house prior to liberation.
“From day to day, the activities of most of the rescuers were more mundane than glamorously heroic… [T]here were months and years of ongoing activities to feed, shelter, and clothe him or her.” (Oliner & Oliner: 49-50) Jewish guests had to be fed. Without ration cards, food could not be bought and cards were given only to those having proper identification – Jews, of course, had none. Fogelman makes an interesting comparison: “Rescuers’ actions, whether they were religious or not, extended beyond the deeds of the Good Samaritan parable in the Bible… While this biblical story encouraged some to get involved, rescuers were well aware that their decision to help was far more demanding and dangerous than caring for a wounded roadside stranger… The Good Samaritan went on his way after a night; a rescuer could not. No one knew how long the war would last.” (1994: 4-5) The social isolation of the Roozes certainly made it easier. The only persons who knew they were hiding Jews, were their neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Dewilde. They only had contact with their family and with other members of the Reformed Church, like the German family Lindemann, a family that in 1933 fled from Nazi Germany and with whom they had become good friends. But the others saw it as collaboration with the Germans. Their son Joop thinks there were never “visitors”, except Reverend Mr. Winter from Antwerp, also the reverend of the Reformed Church of the Sanderusstraat, attended by Henri and Margriet, Klaas and Julia, René and Nelly, Toine Rooze… and many others. Of course, with three or four little children it also was impossible to visit others. Besides, as a Dutch woman and as a Protestant, Truus was considered as an outsider, just like Klaas Sluys; and her husband Henri was not particularly communicative. Apart from their isolation, feelings of affection facilitated rescue too, but did not necessarily determine it. Julia and Truus both really loved Sylvieke. Despite her love, Truus decided to return Sylvieke to her family, even when Sylvieke’s parents had died and that she didn’t want to leave her third “mother”she’d had in six years.
“Comfortable routines were upset and new patterns had to be developed. Husbands and wives gave up their privacy. Children found themselves sleeping with strangers they had to learn to call brother, sister, aunt, uncle – whatever the situation or the occasion required. ‘Sibling’ rivalries and jealousies developed.” (Fogelman, 1998: 665) “At times children in rescuing families [like Joop] were envious of their new siblings [like Sylvieke] because their own parents seemed to give preferential treatment or more admiration to total strangers… [Joop became more aggressive because of this.] The fact that they could not bring other children home rankled… With no one else to play with, their adopted siblings became, by default, their playmates of choice.” (Fogelman, 1994: 146)
Providing shelter was the first order of business. Finding a hiding place in which Jews could disappear in the event of emergencies was the second. Sympathetic family members or neighbours, like Mrs. Dewilde, a neighbour and also a good friend of Truus, would sometimes accommodate these temporary needs. While the children often played in the big garden (with a pond in it) at Mrs. Dewilde’s house, Truus and Mrs. Dewilde had interesting conversations. They were two open- minded women, who widened each other’s view. On one occasion Truus asked Mrs. Dewilde if she had a table lamp and some pleasant things to decorate the room of her “maid” Sophie Vlessing. Mrs. Dewilde was really touched by this question, because in these days it was uncommon to lodge house personnel like this.
We already spoke about the resources one needed for hiding Jews. Mrs. Dewilde was married to the director of a hospital in Lovenjoel (near Korbeek-Lo). This hospital was managed by Catholic sisters and they always got too many food-rationing tickets for their own patients. And Mrs. Dewilde passed on these food-tickets to Henri and Truus, so there was no serious food-problem for so many people. Moreover they also had a big kitchen-garden near their house. They ate in two shifts, except for the family Wesley who lived in a kind of basement. They cooked for themselves and ate separately. Sofie helped Truus with the children and with the household. The Roozes could rent a house, and the Comité de Défense des Juifs (CDJ), a Jewish organisation, provided the Roozes with money for their expenses, but only for Josephine van Engel and Sylvieke Reichman, not for the other Jews they were hiding.
After the war, especially in the fifties and sixties (when they lived in Brussels and they were less isolated), they liked talking about what happened during the war and about their own experiences. They told their children stories about Sylvie and Josephine. They raised their children rather strictly and with principles, and by a number of orthodox rules. E.g. they did not allow their children to take dancing lessons, but on the other hand within the Reformed Community the children had a rather great amount of freedom.
When after the war, Henri’s stepmother got ill; she came to live with Truus and Henri. Truus took care of her, although her children didn’t like the woman at all. After the Hungarian uprising in 1956 they saved up money for the Hungarian refugees. In the seventies Henri and a Catholic priest Goossens, started a home for physically disabled people, where each one had a room of his or her own. Previously they had been lodged in homes for the elderly. As an engineer he guided the construction of the building, and afterwards he was the secretary of this cooperative. Joop says: “Their attitude of life was to stand up for the oppressed.”
At the request of Sylvie Reichman, Henri and Truus were recognised (posthumously) as Righteous Ones by Yad Vashem. Their son Joop Rooze wrote to me: “They saw it as a mission, forthcoming from their faith, to admit Jews into their house during the war. And later on they often offered accommodation to people, who needed a break from ‘ordinary’ life. They saw it as their vocation.” Something special is that Antoine Rooze, one of Henri’s brothers, also got the Yad Vashem medal for hiding a Jewish couple on the countryside in the East of Holland. During the war they had not been in contact with each other.
4.1.5.6 Reverend Herman Jan Winter and his wife Hendrika Van der Burg
Herman Jan Winter, was married to Hendrika Van der Burg. He was the Reverend of the Reformed Church Sanderusstraat in Antwerp. Henri Schuyten and Margriet’s parish, but also the parish of Jeanne, Julia and Klaas, of René and Nelly, of Toine Rooze, of John Polderman, the families Hendrickx, and he also regularly visited the Rooze family at Korbeek-Lo. Karl Ulrich, a German member of the Abwehrstelle, spied upon this parish on July 13 and on August 11 1943, and he wrote two reports about what he’d seen: “Ich habe nun fast vier Wochen die Kirche in der Sanderusstraat 77 in Auge behalten. Die religioesen Uebungen die dort abgehalten werden sind nur sehr schlecht besucht, ich habe nur immer 20 – 25 Personen beobachtet davon waren 75% Frauen und Kinder. Alle verliessen nach dem Gottesdienst den Betsaal. Von einem Lager kann dort niemals die Rede sein, weil das Haus ueberhaupt keine Wohnraume besitzt und zur Unterbringung von Leuten nicht eingerichtet ist. Der Prediger Winter ist sehr antideutsch eingestellt.” After the war, on November 11 1945, a police officer asked Winter if he knew that he and his parish had been suspected and watched. Winter answered: “During the war, in 1943, I was informed that I should be careful, because I had been reported to the Germans as being anti German. The person who warned me was a German officer, director of the German section of the Antwerp prison. In my preaching on Sunday I told the truth about what I thought of the German occupation. [Doing this] I created a lot of discontentment among my listeners, or rather among some of the listeners, Dutch and Flemish people alike. During the occupation I was busy helping ‘divers’, the deliverance of [false] passports and the publication of an illegal paper ‘De Gouden Poort [or The Golden Gate]’. Winter was never arrested, although another member of his parish, Rina Blokland (now married to Marius Joosten) still remembers that her mother told to her that she had given ration tickets for milk to the Reverend Mr. Winter for the Jews. In the garden of the Reverend Mr. Winter stood a summer-house in which according to Rina’s mother Jews were hidden. Winter’s house was nearby that Rina Blokland’s grandfather, who also was a member of Mr. Winter’s parish; so, this information seems to be correct. According to their son Joop, Henri and Truus liked Mr. Winter more than the Reverend Mr. Maaskant of Brussels, probably because of his anti German attitude. During the war Winter also baptised at least one of the Rooze children at their home, and not in church. The moral support of hiding Jews by the religious authority like Winter, must have been very important. Although we didn’t find any connection (yet?) between the story of the Jews we have studied and Winter, the fact that the reverend of all these Protestants hid Jews himself is relevant enough to mention it.
4.1.6 Otto Hutterer: a Jewish helper
Otto Hutterer, a Jewish dentist, who was born in Austria, could keep secret the fact that he was Jewish, and was able to keep practising his profession this way all through the war. He was first mentioned by Edith Hönig. He was married to Trude Michel. He was the one who rented (or helped to rent) an apartment, rue de la Ferme 53, in Sint-Joost-ten-Noode (Brussels) for the families Finkel, Hönig, Anna Hönig Kron, Heinz Schindler, and for a Belgian couple that provided them with food and other necessities of life. This was very important; because of this help they could survive the war. He also visited them several times when they were hiding in Brussels. After the war, they saw each other again, but only a few times before losing contact. After a lot of fruitless inquiries we finally got to know that he was Julia Felderbaum’s brother-in-law, who was an aunt of Heinz Schindler.
“Yad Vashem’s memorial to Jews who perished in World War II bestows special recognition on Christians who saved Jews under the Nazis. No such special recognition is offered to Jewish rescuers. The decision not to reward Jewish rescuers is based on the assumption that for a Jew to help a Jew was a mere duty, a duty that calls for no special awards.” (Tec, 1998: 660)
4.1.7 Conclusion
“Half a century after the events of the Holocaust, what can we learn from studying rescuers of Jews during World War II? Firstly, acts of heroic altruism are not the province of larger-than-life figures. Rather, they are the deeds of ordinary people whose moral courage arises out of the routine ways they live their daily lives – their ways of feeling, their perceptions of what authority should be obeyed, and the models of conduct they learned from parents, friends, or religious instruction.” (Oliner, 1998: 687) “The title bestowed on the rescuers by the state of Israel, ‘Righteous among the Nations of the World,’ misrepresents the historic reality. Many rescuers were not righteous. For some, the motives for rescue were mixed. To many, rescue was not an act of righteousness but a natural response to people in need. For others, rescue was not altruistic. Payment was received, favours were requested. Still others were rescuers for a time; they offered shelter or a haven until the situations got difficult.” (Berenbaum & Peck: 649) We saw that the Hendrickx families should be considered as paid helpers, not as rescuers. The same could be said about René and Nelly, except that René’s contribution as the coordinator of help after Klaas had been arrested, was so important that his contribution as a helper should be considered as a crucial one. Because Poldermans’ act of hiding Jews was only temporary, they too should be considered as helpers. We don’t know enough about the Reverend Mr. Winter’s engagement, but it seems to be that his contribution extends to that of a helper or a rescuer.
“In their original study of rescuers, the Oliners essayed a composite portrait of the rescuers. They concluded that the ‘capacity for extensive relationships’ was what characterized their subjects. This extensivity included: parental modelling of caring behaviour; reasoned discipline for children; communicating of the value of helping others for moral reasons and without respect to reward; encouraging the qualities of dependability, responsibility, and self-reliance; willingness to take risks; inclusiveness with respect to others who are different; openness to new experiences; and positive self-evaluation. In their second reflection of this topic, the Oliners again presented extensivity as the overarching teaching which facilitates prosocial attitudes and action, and linked it more systematically with attachment and inclusiveness… Fogelman, calling this teaching ‘acceptance,’ reaches a similar conclusion: I found that one quality above all others was emphasized time and time again: a familial acceptance of people who were different. This value was the centrepiece of the childhood of rescuers and became the core from which their rescuer self evolved.” (Blumenthal: 70, 71) We found out that it is not that simple. Henri Rooze, Truus van Buuren, and Klaas had not had a childhood in which people who were different were familially accepted. Julia however did. Her parents could be a perfect model for what the Oliners and Fogelman describe. Henri Rooze and Margriet Oudheusden, should be considered as rescuers. They hid several Jews themselves and the extensivity with which they raised their children proved to be crucial, because Jeanne became a professional rescuer, Julia a rescuer, and René an indispensable helper. Julia and Klaas, and Henri and Truus are now recognized as Righteous Ones by Yad Vashem. And this is how it should be.
4.2 The victims and their experiences
“The official concept of ‘Jew’ evolved in two stages. In 1933, the phrase ‘non-Aryan’ was introduced to cover every person, Jewish or Christian, who had at least one Jewish grandparent. Two years later those non-Aryans who had at least three Jewish grandparents were classified as Jews… The formulation of 1935 was applied not only in Germany, but also in territories under German control, including… Belgium… “In the Holocaust, Jews were not killed for what they did or did not believe, and they could not escape death by conversion, apostasy, or change of ideology. They were murdered for being Jews, that is, for being descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. There was absolutely no element of personal decision in their fate: they were murdered for having been born… Did the victims have any choice? Hardly.” (Bauer: 206, 187) “What role do the victims play in that story?… Victims are not passive, except in their last moments. We must know how the Nazis’ victims behaved, what cultural baggage they had to start with, and whether their behaviour or their baggage was useful in any way. We must know what they thought, how they reacted, what they did.” (Bauer: xv)
“Faced with the determination of the Third Reich to exterminate them, the European Jews had three behavioural options. First, they could collaborate fully with the Nazis in the hope that by doing so, they could save themselves. Second, they could adopt what Lawrence Baron has called ‘defensive acquiescence’, hoping that by complying with all Nazi requests, the Nazis would exempt them from destruction. Third, they could choose to resist. The definition of resistance is crucial to understanding Jewish behaviour; Raul Hilberg considers resistance to mean only the use of arms. Yehuda Bauer’s definition is broader, including ‘all active and conscious organized action against the Nazi command’s policies, or wishes, by whatever means: social organization, morale–building operations, underground political work, active unarmed resistance or, finally, armed resistance… Resistance for anyone was difficult in the Third Reich, but it was doubly so for Jews, who were scattered among a largely indifferent and frequently hostile Gentile population. The obstacles seemed insurmountable. And yet, many Jews resisted: they fought those who tried to round them up, they engaged in sabotage, they hid.” (Oliner, 1998: 684, 685) Most of the Jews we have studied, tried to escape or tried to hide. We agree with Oliner that these were forms of resistance too. One needed awareness, character, the will to take the initiative, resources, information, relations with others that could help, immunity to stress and especially an enormous amount of patience, to do so, and of course a great deal of luck.
“In many works the implicit assumptions regarding the victims’ generalized hopelessness and passivity, or their inability to change the course of events leading to their extermination, have turned them into a static and abstract element of the historical background.” (Friedländer: 2) Hilberg’s intrest for example lies outside the Jewish experience of persecution. The focus is placed on the perpetrators. “In most accounts of Nazism that do not explicitly focus on the oppressed, the victims remain wholly ‘invisible’ – an indistinct, anonymous mass of wretched beings, shadows or shells of human life with no voice of their own. The victims, again, simply add up to a number, the number of lost lives used to indict the perpetrators. Moreover, even when the victims are given consideration, the analysis tends to ignore entirely their mental life as victims and the phenomenology of victimhood. It is as if victimhood only entailed the outside violence visited upon them, and not an inner experience of it and a psychological transformation. Ordinary people are not ‘born’ perpetrators or victims; they become so, through discernable psychological processes. These processes are essential for understanding the dynamics of the Holocaust, and their utter neglect falsifies the picture of what happened and why.” (Zukier: 203) “That the overarching attempts in these books do not deal with the Jews except as murdered victims distorts the picture completely. What we see here may be an unconscious treatment of the Jews as the quintessential Other. If they are the other, they need not be described as a people with a history, a culture, and conflicting individual identities.” (Bauer: 112) Again we are confronted with the problem that in the meantime most of the victims have died, so we can’t ask them anymore for additional information. This makes Edith Hönig’s testimony, 17 years of age in 1942, even more important, than it already was, although in 2005 she wrote: “Not everything that happened was at the time clear to me, and besides I can’t remember, how one thing and another precisely went as they did.”
4.2.1 The survivors
“Academics and health professionals… defined a Holocaust survivor as someone who survived concentration camp and/or ghettos. It is only within the last years that historians and psychologists have acknowledged an array of experiences in surviving Nazi persecution: hiding, escaping, disguising oneself as an Aryan, fighting in a resistance unit. My research was among the early attempts to broaden the definition of a survivor. (Fogelman, 1994: 16)
“Above all, we need the witness. There is no Holocaust history without witnesses. The direct testimony of the survivors… ease our understanding…” (Bauer: 23) Documents created at the time are not the only reliable testimony, ‘survivors’ testimonies are crucial to understand the events of the period. They become extremely useful and reliable when cross-checked with and borne out by many other testimonies. They are then, I would argue, at least as reliable as a written document of the time. All of this has to be stated explicitly because it strengthens the argument for the explicability of the Holocaust: the more testimonies we have, as well as documentation, the greater our chances of explaining and understanding what happened. Explicability is not equivalent to a one-dimensional, dry historical narrative or analysis. A cognitive analysis may help us to understand; an analysis combined with the telling of the story as it happened to individuals, families, villages, and towns is much better.” (Bauer: 25) “Testimony forces us to think qualitatively and we have to face the fact that to do it justice may require working with smaller rather than larger numbers of individuals; this allows, however, through the greater self-reflectivity of those collecting and utilising the material, for the richness of testimony to come to the fore, including its contradictions and mythologies. It is a radical vision, but in the end choosing confusion over smoothness in the representation of life story testimony, whether contemporary or post-war, is to do greater justice to the way the Holocaust was actually experienced on an everyday level.” (Boxham & Kushner: 47) “A life story approach is required, examining the years before the Holocaust impacted on the individual, as well as during it, and, for the survivors, their life beyond liberation and the end of the war… We should also respect the desire of some to keep their silence.” (Boxham & Kushner: 6, 45)
“In a western arc extending from Norway through Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to Italy, hiding out was not even unusual, but in Germany, Poland, the Baltic area, and the occupied USSR, it was much more dangerous and difficult. If location was one determining factor, then money was another. Almost everywhere, a Jew who had cash or salable possessions could start with an immediate advantage. Transportation, shelter, or a disguise could be expensive, especially when needed desperately. Finally, however, flight was a function of personality.” (Hilberg: 154) “There were, first of all, people who left in time – the refugees.” (Hilberg: x) Then you had the “divers”, a term the Dutch used for those who needed a place to hide. (Fogelman, 1994: 222) The Jews we’ve studied were refugees who tried to escape as well as divers. None of them took part in an act of armed resistance.
4.2.1.1 The family Hönig
In connecton with the story of Julia Schuyten we’ve already told that the Hönig family lived in Amsterdam. At home they spoke Dutch. Sigmund Hönig and his wife, Rosa Gross, both were born in Poland. In 1915 Rosa’s mother, Scheindel, fled from Poland because of the pogroms. Edith wrote about it: “I still remember the stories of my mother; that they went away via burning villages with her children, Rosa (my mother), Thea, Munio and carrying Max, who was still a baby, on her arm. Igo, the eldest, seems already to have been in Vienna… Thea and her husband were arrested in France and didn’t return, and Munio could hide his little daughters, Judith and Elly, with a family, but they were betrayed, deported and didn’t return either.”
“Sigmund’s father, Asher Hönig, was the steward of a rich Polish farmer. Asher was the one who controlled everything. Sigmund grew up on this farm together with five other children, of which one got killed in the First World War. “My father, at the age of 16 or 17, went to Vienna, were he joined the army. I think that it was there that he got acquainted with Igo Gross [who also had joined the army] who was the connection with my mother. Because my grandfather couldn’t keep his hands off women, my grandmother ran away and divorced him. She lived very poorly and had very little means of existence. Later on she died in a concentration camp, as did her daughter Rosa, and her grandchildren Sigi and Sara.”
In 1929 Sigmund Hönig started a factory for the production of perfume and permanent-wave machines, exporting these products, for instance to Belgium. In 1936 he also had plans to widen his activities, with a production line in Belgium, but his request was rejected by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. Over the years, a business relationship with Klaas, who also was in the perfume business, had turned into a closer relationship, close enough for him to take a chance and ask Klaas for help at the moment when things were at their worst.
On June 27 1942 because the younger people were called up by the Germans for the so called labour camps, they decided to flee from Amsterdam to France. Edith and Lily were accompanied by one uncle and two aunts, Philip Landau and Thea Gross; and Anne Hönig Kron, and Heinz was accompanied by his parents. Unfortunately four members of the group got caught by the Germans in France. The others, Edith, Lily, Heinz and Anna, who were walking a little bit behind the first group, could escape, but they were so frightened that they returned to Belgium.
Meanwhile on August 10 1942 Sigmund and his wife had fled to Belgium, and asked Klaas for help. They were first sheltered by Henri Schuyten and Margriet, then by John Polderman and his wife Lea, from November 20 1942 by René and Nelly until their transfer to Door Hendrickx and his wife Philomena.
On August 15 1942 Edith, Lily, Heinz Schindler and Anna Hönig Kron returned from France, and also sought refuge with Klaas and Julia. The result was that they could hide at Withof, the house of Klaas and Julia, for a couple of weeks. In 1995 Edith wrote:
I remember this stay as one of the happiest periods of my diving time. We had a bathroom of our own, and even a little side room I think, where we could listen to music on the radio to one’s heart’s content. This music consisted for a large part of German light music, but at our age and under these conditions every music was welcome. As soon as it became dark outside, we could leave the house, and I still remember the evening walks in the beautiful garden. To my disgrace I must admit, that a great number of peaches fell victim to our greed, something I hope the family [Sluys], after all these years, has forgiven us. We had regular meals, which took place in the common dining room downstairs. What I remember are the prayers and blessing before and after the meals. Certainly at moments like these, the meals were blessed indeed.
Great was our disappointment, combined with disapproval as a result of incomprehensibility, when on a certain day we were told we had to move to somewhere else. Certainly we didn’t understand the great danger the family Klaas had brought upon themselves by hiding us, nor the fact that we had to make room for other Jewish refugees, who, just like us before, had no place to hide, and finally ended up with the family Sluys. This is something I only got to know after reading Mrs. Sluys’ story. When we later heard that Mr. Sluys had been arrested, we heard not only that Jews were arrested who were staying in the villa, but also that there was a secret printer. What Mrs. Sluys does not mention is the fact that in Edegem there were a couple of farmers that took Jews in. They asked a high price for it, but considering the risk they took, we found this reasonable. These farmers belonged to the same church as the family Sluys. They formed a closely knit unit; this found expression in their protection of the Jews. If I’m not mistaken in this period of October- November approximately 15 Jews were in hiding in Edegem.
Through an unlucky event at the beginning of 1943 this period came to an end. During a razzia, most [correction: some] of those in hiding were arrested, among whom my uncle, [Igo Gross] who stayed in one of the farms. On the way to Poland, he managed to jump out of the train, and he still lived for many years in the United States together with his wife, who at the time of his arrest was staying at the same farm, but hid herself. [She was blond and had blue eyes and sat outside on the toilet. When a German opened the door of the toilet, he saw her, and said: ‘Entschuldige!’ and he left her alone, probably not suspecting that she was Jewish.]
Apparently there was enough time to warn us, and so we all started walking away in the street in broad daylight. We kept walking until the evening. When night fell, we haphazardly knocked on the door of a farm, and asked for shelter, hoping that these were ‘good’ people. If I remember well, René Schuyten found us there, but I don’t know how he got to know where we were. Anyway, it was he, who was to find shelter for us elsewhere.
And suddenly a certain Mr. Hutterer enters into the picture, [who helped them to rent an apartment in Brussels, where they could stay until the day of liberation.]
The house in the rue de la Ferme had two floors. We, with the ten of us, stayed upstairs, the Belgian couple lived downstairs. The man, who was called Louis, was a warder in a Brussels prison. He visited us regularly, and then he told us extensively, what had been happening here and there in town. He was a cheerful person, especially when he had had a few [drinks], something which happened from time to time. We knew that he was not so very particular in telling the truth, but we gladly accepted it, knowing that he did it to cheer us up.
During this one-and-a-half-year period [from April 8 1943 until the liberation on September 4 1944] of one and a half years, we didn’t dare to leave the house once. There were bad but also good moments. On one day for example we heard that the house was going to be sold. The new owner wanted to see the inside. What to do with all those in hiding…? A few of us hid ourselves in the coal-storage. This was supposed to be impossible to open, with the excuse that the key was missing. Elsewhere we had stage-managed a sewing-circle: in a room some women were busy repairing clothes. Another room was transformed into a study, in which some of the younger ones diligently were studying their books. Everything looked normal, and we were convinced that we had done a good job.
Much later, after the war, we found out that the new buyer had known of our identity, but that he had joined the game, not wanting to frighten us. This was one of the many proofs, that there also were good people, with their heart on the right place. We just as well could have been betrayed, because in the meanwhile a number of people had gotten to know of our existence. We were constantly afraid to be betrayed, to be arrested and to be sent to one of the camps that we already knew of. The sword of Damocles constantly was hanging over our head.
Another fact worth mentioning: an English airplane was shot down. The pilot saved himself with his parachute, and landed in… rue de la Ferme! The street was cordoned off, followed by a round-up searching house by house. Fortunately for us, but certainly not for the pilot, he was found not far from our house, and the search was stopped.
What was our life like? We tried to make the best out of it and to let it proceed as normal as possible. Everyone had a task, for example peeling potatoes, something everyone hated to do. But our main menu was potatoes, thus one should consider, how many potatoes had to be peeled. There came no end to this mountain!
We also looked for distraction and amusement, however strange this may sound in our situation. On Saturdays we practised religion. We said prayers, accompanied by explication and discussion. We were used to the rabbi giving a sermon at each service. This task we now fulfilled in turn. I think I remember that there were interesting, high-level subjects were discussed.
From time to time we performed a play about a Biblical subject, for example the story of the two mothers who disputed each other’s motherhood of a baby, and King Solomon’s wise solution. Or on a hot day we were told to spend the day under the motto: ‘a summer day at the beach’. Although we had few clothes, we improvised beach wear, and we transformed a watering can and a ladder into a public shower at the beach. Our joy and exuberance were almost indescribable. This and that gave us an outlet on which we could fall back again for a while.
I myself somehow got my hands on an English study book. Thus, I tried to use this forced situation to gather knowledge that, as it turned out, would help me a lot later in life. We may not forget our bridge and rummy tournaments. These kept us busy for days on end, because what we did not lack was time on our hands. However, as a consequence, for the rest of my life I hated everything that had to do with card games – much to the disappointment of those, who now enjoy a game and by whom I am considered to be a spoilsport in the real sense of the word.
[All of this was amidah, which, according to Bauer, is almost impossible to translate: a kind of unarmed resistance, including cultural, educational, religious and political activities to strengthen the moral. (210)]
A happy event that happened in rue de la Ferme involved my uncle Igo. I already mentioned him as having gone into hiding in Charles Hendrickx’ house, where he, on that terrible day, caused by Jo Polak [correction: by Gustaaf De Schutter who betrayed Jonas Polak], was discovered and transferred to the infamous military barracks in Malines. From there he was sent to the east. But he happened to be on the famous train transport XX! After partisans managed to stop the train, he too could escape. It took him two days walking back to Brussels. He had lived there before the war and he went to his former address. The neighbours there knew of our hiding place rue de la Ferme and they brought him to us. You can imagine the joy of all of us, especially that of his wife, Rosl.
That is how we passed the year, always hoping for a favourable change in the war, that finally would give us back our freedom. Undescribable was our joy when this happened when on September 4 1944 Brussels was liberated by the Allied Forces. We all stepped onto the balcony, where, for the first time since long we were able to see the open sky and what the street looked like, something we until then, only had been able to observe through a little hole in the curtain. We, as the younger ones, in our enthusiasm had less difficulties with it, but, as we only understood later on, this was not the case for the older ones among us. With some of them it never disappeared completely.
[Some Jews survived mainly because they were able to pay, but] From the moment we went to Brussels, the money my father had brought with him from Holland was used, and no one of the others in hiding was wealthy. So my father had to go and look for (an) other financial resource(s). I don’t know how the contact was restored, but after the war I heard that again it was the family Sluys who threw themselves into the breach, and who lent a large sum of money. This of course entailed a big risk, because no one could be sure, that we would survive the war and that we could pay the money back. I also heard after the war, that my father very quickly could pay off the debt, thanks to the fact that he was able to do good business in Brussels, because of the economic boom that developed there. Brussels immediately became a sparkling city and a centre of business life, probably caused by the quick liberation and the favourable location. This also was one of the reasons why only in the beginning of 1946 did we return to Holland, even though it already had been liberated for more than half a year.
All in all we were very lucky, that we survived the war in this manner, and that we encountered people like Klaas and Julia who saved our lives. It was no coincidence that they were honoured by Yad Vashem. May this bring good on their descendants, who may be proud of their parents and grandparents.
I must say that my sister and me – the only present survivors of that period – thank our lives to the family Sluys, to their help when we didn’t see a way out anymore; to their conviction that they were chosen from Above to offer Jews a helping hand and to convince co-religionist to do the same.
Why only now come forward now with this story? Why was contact not searched earlier to show our gratitude? If you are acquainted with the psychological developments of a lot of our fellow-sufferers and fellow-believers, you will know that a lot of us try to hide the past and try only to occupy ourselves with the future. In my own case this was Israel, in which I lived for 16 years. These were beautiful, albeit difficult years. The return to Europe brought me back to the past. For some years I lived in Belgium, but I didn’t feel up to a confrontation with this episode.”
On November 5 1944, shortly after the liberation of Brussels, the Public Security wrote a little note concerning the whole family Hönig, containing the following phrase: “Les intéressés ne désirent séjourner en Belgique que quelques semaines. Proposition: 1) enquête sur leur comportement au point de vue national. 2) ensuite, si enquête favorable, les informer qu’ils ne sont pas autorisés à se fixer définitivement en Belgique et qu’ils devront quitter le pays dès que les circumstances le permettront.”
After the war Sigmund financially supported his sister, Anna, for years: “In an official document we can read: “Hönig, Chana, n’exerce aucune profession, et ne possède ni permis de travail ni carte professionnelle. Elle déclare être aide pécuniairement par son frère résident en Hollande à raison de 150 florins par mois. L’intéressée n’ayant aucun moyen d’existence contrôlable, nous émettons un avis défavorable quant à la délivrance de la carte d’identité pour étrangers.”
Louis, the steward died shortly after the war, due to his drinking problem. His partner, Mrs. Hermans, continued to live in Brussels for quite some time, and Sigmund, who stayed in contact with her, invited her several times to Holland.
After the war, Lily Hönig married Gotti Finkel. Sigmund and his wife returned to Amsterdam. When Sigmund died in 1974, his wife Rosa, joined Lilly and Gottfried in Belgium. When Gottfried died in 1981, Lily and her mother left for Israel. Rosa died in 1992 and Lily died in 2003. Edith left for Israel shortly after the war. Fifteen years later she returned to Belgium. Now she lives with her husband Burton Sanders in The Hague. Anna Hönig Kron stayed in Belgium until her death in 1985.
4.2.1.2 The Finkel family
Markus Finkel was born in Russia and fled to Austria. There he met Laura Einig, a Russian countrywoman. They married in 1921. Gottfried was born in Vienna in 1922, and a year later, his sister Selma was born in Kichinev Rumania (currently: Chisinau Moldavia). He was a commercial traveller. They went to Lisbon, and on July 18 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, they came to Belgium. In 1936 he and his wife became peddlers/market vendors in knitwear. Gottfried went to school. In 1941 Laura was hospitalized, probably for her eyes. She became blind. A couple of days after Hitler invaded Russia, the Belgian General Secretary, Romsee decided that the Finkels (and others) no longer could be considered as Russian refugees, and henceforth would be considered as “without any nationality”.
The protestant church in the Bexstraat lies in the middle of the Jewish quarter of Antwerp. Some friends of Klaas and Julia were members of that church, and they must haven been asked for help by one of the Finkels, because Gottfried just lost his job. In the spring of 1942 the Jews with a business had to close it, and consequently their employees, who were predominantly Jews, lost their jobs too and no longer could earn a living. Klaas employed Gottfried as his accountant, who crossed the fields at night to come to work and left in the morning, doing something that was not permitted. Klaas was not allowed to employ him, therefore, Gottfried had to stay indoors during the evening and night.
When the razzia’s and round-ups of Jews started at the end of July 1942, Gottfried asked for help for his blind mother, his father and his sister, because they too were afraid to be put on transport. Klaas asked Henri Schuyten to hide Gottfried’s parents, whereas he and Julia hid Gottfried and Selma in their house. In a police report of August 16 1945 he says that during the occupation he and his fiancée, Lilly Hönig, stayed [with Door Hendrickx and his wife] in the Drie Eikenstraat nr. 59 in Edegem from August 1942 until April [correction: March] 1943. From April 1943 until September 1943 they stayed at Fonteinstraat 85 in Hasselt, and From September 1943 until the liberation of Brussels at rue de la Ferme Nr 53. This we could read already in Edith’s story of how they all finally ended up in Brussels.
Shortly after the liberation, in November 1944 several police officers collected information about the Finkels, who now already had been living in Belgium for 15 years. In a report dated January 13 1945 we can read the following disgraceful and shameful lines: “Nous avons notifié à ces étrangers qu’ils ne sont pas autorisées à s’établir en Belgique et qu’ils devront quitter le pays dès que les circonstances le permettront.” On August 20 1946 Gottfried and Lily marry in Amsterdam, and a few months later she comes to Belgium. On March 4 1947 Selma Finkel marries Heinz Schindler. A few months later they leave for Holland.
Like his father, Gottfried became a trader in trinkets. On May 10 1948 his request for a professional card, a work permit as a wholesaler of trinkets, was rejected on the following ground: “The person’s activity is of no economic value for the country.” Lacking a work permit, Gottfried was not allowed to work. Consequently, they were forced to live with his parents, in one apartment. At that time, his father Markus, was a clerk of the Jewish Committee, so he could earn a living. In 1951 Gottfried at last got his work.permit. He and Lily got two children, Judith and Danielle. In 1959 Gottfried aquired the Belgian nationality, followed by Lily in 1960. In 1957 Markus Finkel and Laura Einig became Belgian citizens too.
4.2.1.3 The Gross family
Igo Gross, who was a furrier, was born in Padworno in Poland. In the summer of 1938, after the Anschluss and at a time when Germany was threatening to invade Czechoslovakia, he had fled from Austria to the border of Germany and Holland. Edith Hönig still remembers that her father, together wit her uncle Philip Landau and herself, went to the border near Venlo (Holland) by car, where they picked up Igo, three other uncles and Edith’s grandfather. They entered a café that stood partly on German soil and partly on Dutch soil. Igo entered the German side of the café, and left by the Dutch side. One or two weeks earlier their spouses had crossed the border in the same manner. They drove their relatives to Amsterdam, were they stayed (illegally of course) and then they went on to Belgium, where refugees could slip in more easily. Igo arrived in Belgium on August 22 1938, followed by his wife Rosa on November 11 1938. On a paper of the Holland-America line of 1938 we discovered an “Affidavit of support” of a “Jewellery salesman” Norbert Salter, living in New York, saying that he could support his relatives, Igo Gross and his wife, until they can earn a livelihood themselves. This means the Gross family had a real intention to emigrate to the United States. Probably they had the same problem as did Hersz Nadel. Their nationality was still Polish, even though they had left Poland for many, many years. Therefore the Polish authorities didn’t consider them as Polish subjects any longer, and they really needed official documents from the Polish authorities to enter the United States. In a declaration of January 11 1939, as a political refugee, Igo wrote to the Belgian Minister of Justice: “J’ai été persécuté par le Gestapo et j’ai dû m’enfuir pour ne pas être mis au camp de concentration.” He asks if they can stay in Belgium until they can emigrate to the United States. “Je possède des moyens suffisants pour pouvoir subsister sans devoir travailler.”
We found a note of March 6 1939 from the Chief Inspector of Police in Antwerp for the Public Security that this couple was allowed to stay until June 30 1939, mentioning: “The person concerned is not allowed to settle in Belgium. He is ordered to leave the country.” What was really strange is that the Belgian Public Security asked the Police in Vienna, if Igo Gross did not have a criminal record. On March 30 1939 a police inspector in Vienna answers, “das die in der Folge genannten Personen nicht ungunstig beleumndet werden und als bestraft nicht vermerkt sind.” On May 10 1940 Germany invaded Belgium, and immediately Igo, who had come from Austria, was arrested for security reasons and taken to the camp of St. Cyprien in France. Rosa followed him. In October 1940, they returned to Antwerp but from January 25 until April 17 1941 they were forced to work in Zelem, near Diest in the province of Limbourg. Rosa’s sister Salomea accompanied them. Afterwards they went to Schaarbeek. Rosalie got the certificate of her inscription in the register of foreigners on September 22 1942. Igo got his certificate six days later. She went into hiding in Edegem with Charles Hendrickx. He stayed in Schaarbeek until March 11 1943, when he went to Charles Hendrickx too. One day later, the Gestapo arrested him there, and after his interrogation by the Gestapo, they took him to Malines, where he had to await deportation to Auschwitz. Rosa could escape because a German thought that she was not Jewish thanks to her blond hair and her blue eyes. On April 19 1943 Igo was placed on transport XX with the number 1265. “My findings about Jewish rescuers suggest that under special circumstances, a victim may become a rescuer and a hero.” (Tec, 1998: 659) The Jewish partisan, Youra Livschitz, was such a man. Together with the communist, Jean Franklemon, and the student, Robert Maistriau, he managed to stop the train at Boortmeerbeek. They opened a door of a wagon and liberated seventeen men and women, before the Germans started shooting. This action was unique, because it was the only attempt in Europe to stop a train to Auschwitz. But not just these three men were heroes. The Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg wrote about what he calls “cette rébellion de déportés”: “[L]e XXème convoi est remarquable. La tentative de libérer les détenus de l’extérieur ne suffit pas à illustrer son exemplarité. L’entreprise des déportés eux-mêmes qui, de l’intérieur, agissent pour s’évader est plus significative. Les résultats sont aussi plus marquants. Le 19 avril 1943, un déporté sur sept tente ou réussit son évasion. Ils étaient 1.631 au départ de Malines. Quand le train passe la frontière, ils ne sont plus que 1.400. Deux cent trente et un ont risqué la mort pour s’échapper… ‘ils savant si bien ce qui les attend qu’avant d’avoir franchi la frontière, ils sautent en pleine marche au risque de se rompre les os.’ Ils sautent certes, mais tous ne sautent pas quand ils en ont la possibilité. Du wagon ouvert par la résistance, une dizaine seulement courent le risque d’être abattus par l’escorte pour ne pas arriver à Auschwitz. Dans les autres wagons – rares son ceux où il n’y a pas d’évadés. – la plupart des prisonniers ne suivent pas l’exemple des plus résolus…. En l’occurrence, la police SS confirme l’exemplarité de ce ‘convoi des évadés’: les deux cent trente et un fugitives du XXème transport représentent près de la moitié des 571 déportés qui, du 4 août 1942 au 31 juillet 1944, auront tenté ou réussi leur évasion… A l’arrivé du XXéme convoi, 521 matricules sont attribués, mais 1.031 déportés ne laissent pas de trace nominale dan les archives des camps. 150 déportés survivront à la libération. C’est le premier convoi dont le pourcentage des survivants est si élevé, les autres convois de 1943 seront plus proches de la solution finale.” (Steinberg: 120-125, 152) The resistance had smuggled instruments into some of the cars to assist those who wanted to escape. In total 231 deportees escaped before the transport reached the German border. Twenty-six were killed by the bullets of the German guards or died from an unfortunate fall from the train. Of the others ninety deportees were caught again and put on the next transport. One hundred fifteen deportees succeeded in their escape. Igo was one of them. In the vicinity of Tirlemont, he managed to jump out of the train, walk to Schaerbeek, and join the others in Brussels who were in hiding there.
He joined his wife in Brussels, rue de la Ferme. On November 7 1944 in a police report he stated : “J’ai été aidé par plusieurs personnes, afin de subsister et notamment par l’agent de police DAEMS, de Schaerbeek, dont je vous remet une attestation afin de la joindre à mon dossier. Je n’ai jamais émargé au ravitaillement allemande en n’ai fait partie d’aucun organisme d’ordre nouveau.” The police officer takes a note: “Les intéressés déclarent vouloir se fixer en Palestine. Je les informerais qu’ils ne peuvent s’établir en Belgique et qu’ils devront quitter le pays dès que les circonstances le permettront…” On July 24 1946 he applied for a working permit as “confectionneur de fourrures et vêtements”. His request was rejected. He appealed to a higher court, but on August 11 1948, his request was rejected again and this decision is final. On September 7 1948 the mayor of Schaarbeek got a letter from the Ministry of Justice: “Vous voudrez bien informer les intéressés qu’ils ne sont pas autorisés à s’établir en Belgique et qu’ils sont tenus de poursuivre leurs démarches en vue d’immigrer au plus tôt dans un autre pays.” In the beginning of 1949 they left the inhospitable Belgium for the United States.
4.2.1.4 Heinz Schindler
Heinz Schindler was born in Vienna. At the time the war broke out, he and his parents were living in Amsterdam. After a razzia, it was too risky to return to his parents, Samuel Schindler and Kamille Körner, who also were living in Amsterdam. So he stayed with the family Hönig, until they decided to flee to France. Heinz could speak French. They wanted to pass the demarcation line with Vichy-France in order to get to Switzerland. But in France Samuel and Kamille fell into the hands of the Gestapo (or the German police). They did not return. When Heinz returned to Belgium accompanied by Edith and Lily Hönig (and Anna Hönig Kron), their father, Sigmund, started to regard him as his foster son. In a police report dated November 10 1944 we can read something very interesting: “L’étranger apatride Schindler, Heinz, né à Vienne, le 13/8/1921; célibataire, o./caoutchoutier, est inscrit en cette commune, rue de la Ferme, 53, depuis le 17.9.1944. Il est arrivé en Belgique, en août 1942, venant d’Amsterdam. Afin d’échapper aux recherches de la police allemande, il a résidé clandestinement aux adresses suivantes :
1. du 15/8/1942 au 20/10/1942 chez le nommé Sluys, Klaas, demeurant à Bouchout-Heuvelstraat, 3;
2. du 20/10/1942 au 13/3/1943, chez la famille Hendrickx, à Edegem-Drie Eikenstraat, 59;
3. du 13.3.1943 au 1/4/1943, à Moortsel-Kerkplein, 5, nom de l’occupant oublié par Schindler;
4. du 1/4/1943 au 8/4/1943, chez le nommé Van Hée, demeurant à Etterbeek-rue des Cultiveurs, 41;
5. du 8/4/1943 jusqu’à la libération de Bruxelles, rue de la Ferme, 53.”
He was very precise in his information. Probably one way or another he managed to contact his aunt, Julia Felderbaum Herzfeld at Koekelberg. Her brother-in-law was Otto Hutterer, who helped them to rent an apartment for them.
After the war, Heinz stayed with the family Hönig. In a police report dated December 17 1944, we can read: “Il n’exerce aucune profession. Il déclare posséder 20.000 frs. et vivre à charge de parents de sa fiancée, les époux Hönig-Gross, demeurant à la meme adresse.” Heinz’s fiancée at that time is still Edith Hönig, but later on they broke their engagement. From a police report dated August 14 1945, we learn that he for his part got the message: “qu’il n’est pas autorisé à s’établir dans le royaume. En conséquence il devra quitter le pays dès que les circonstances le permettront.” Heinz stayed with the Hönigs, until on March 3 1947 he married Selma Finkel and they moved to Amsterdam.
4.2.2 The dead
Between 1942 and 1944, 25,257 prisoners were shipped in some 28 convoys from Malines to Auschwitz. Two-thirds of them had died upon arrival. Of the remaining third, only 1,207 prisoners survived an inhuman captivity to see the liberation of the Nazi camps. In Belgium 19.7 percent of the deportees were children up to the age of fifteen… “Very few children could survive in camps. Of 4918 children to age fifteen, who were deported to Auschwitz from Belgium, 53 returned.” (Hilberg: 146, 148)
4.2.2.1 The ravage in the family of Sylvie Reichman
Sylvie’s father, Benoit Reichman, was a salesman. On February 15 1925, together with his sister Myriam, he migrated from Satu Mare in Rumania to Belgium. His mother, Fanni Roth, would follow one week later. And in August his father, Ludovic Reichman, and his son Maurice brought up the rear. Benoit followed his brothers, Eugène, Joseph and Alexander, who had already emigrated in 1923. First he found work as a leather-worker, as a servant in a hotel and before 1935 as a diamond-cutter. Small artisanal industries like diamond, leather and textile were the typical branches of business in which the Jews were active, because they were industries with a low level of industrial development and only a small possibility to standardize. (Laureys: 50) Later on he became a diamond trader and an entrepreneur of diamond work. His brothers and his brother-in-law also were in the diamond (or gold) business, as were his future father-in-law and his future brothers-in-law.
On December 12 1927 Sylvie’s mother, Itta Grunspan emigrated from Mosciska in Poland to Belgium. She started working as a servant with her sister and brother-in-law, Charlotte Grunspan and Lobel Lachter, who was the first to emigrate to Belgium. She got paid 50 Bfr. a month and all found. In 1920 Lobel had come to Belgium to study accountancy. As a student he was supported financially by family members who lived here. After his studies he returned to Poland. He emigrated to Belgium in 1925, and one year later married in Krakau. On August 16 1926 Lobel brought his wife, Itta’s sister Charlotte, to Belgium. He was a successful diamond splitter. Soon the rest of her family would follow. Four months later Itta arrived in Belgium; her father, Joel Grunspan, followed her a month later. Then Lobel asked a socialist Member of Parliament, Jan Samijn, to write a letter to the Governor of the Province of Antwerp asking to grant him a residence permit, valid indefinitely, because of his bad health. He got it. On April 16 1928 Joel wrote a letter to the Governor, asking what he must do to get the same residence permit for his wife, five of his children and their nurse-maiden. Samijn wrote a letter to the Minister: “Le soussigné, exerçant la profession de négociant en diamants, est fort honorablement connu dans le commerce diamantaire et voudrait avoir sa famille auprès de lui à Anvers.” Thanks to Samijn’s intercession, they all got a residence permit, and so, on June 28 1928 Joel’s wife, Dobe Thaler, arrived in Belgium, accompanied by her children Erna, Hella, Lina, Edek and Monek. Only her oldest daughter, Etta, who had already married to Benjamin Karfiol, stayed in Poland. It may seem a detail, but this decision would be one with fatal consequences. During the war it was extremely difficult for Jews to survive in Poland. Etta and her husband didn’t survive, but their daughter, Danuta Karfiol and her later husband Henry Diamant however, miraculously did. Together with eleven others they were hidden by a Polish teenager, Stefania Podgórska Burzminska and her little sister Helena. It is a great rescue story that has been told by Eva Fogelman (87-104) and mentioned by Jones as well (218-219). On May 24 1946 the young couple applied for a visa for Belgium to visit her grandmother, Dobe Thaler, and to emigrate to the United States, where her uncle, Lobel Lachter, who had become an American citizen, had prepared the necessary affidavits. He wrote a letter to the Administration of the Alien Police: “The purpose for their request for a temporary residence permit is to give the couple Diamant-Karfiol the opportunity to stay in Belgium until the moment of their emigration, because their lives in Poland are in danger. Now they succeeded to be saved, I want to do everything possible to secure their lives and therefore a quick departure from Poland to Belgium is urgent. Their request is supported by the Jewish Organisation HISO (Help for Jewish Victims of the War).” On August 6 their request was rejected.
On January 15 1935, a certain J. De Geyter, living on the ground floor Lange Leemstraat 368 Antwerp wrote a letter to the director of the Public Security. On the first floor Ludovic Reichman and his wife Fani Roth live, together with their sons, Benoit and Maurice. De Geyter’s letter gives a good and representative impression about the intolerant climate in Antwerp towards strangers that already existed in the mid thirties, although the Reichman family already lived in Antwerp for more than ten years: “Depuis de longs mois, ma femme et moi, n’éprouvons que des difficultés de ces étrangers, qui tant au point de vue de propreté que sociabilité laissent beaucoup à désirer. Je ne désire même pas vous souligner leurs allures parfois plus que suspectes.” A policeman got an order to investigate this, but comes to the conclusion: “Concerning the common behaviour and the contact of members of this family, we heard nothing unfavourable.” On February 15 1935 De Geyter got a letter in which he is told that the Public Security does not intervene in cases of “mésentente entre locataires”.
Benoit and Itta married on June 21 1938. They had one daughter. Sylvie was born in Antwerp on November 1 1939, but because her parents still had the Rumanian nationality, she also had the Rumanian nationality.
In 1938 Itta’s brother-in-law, Lobel Lachter, his wife and their two children, Jacques and Lily, decided to emigrate to the United States.
When the war broke out, Benoit’s youngest brother, Alexander Reichman, his wife, Rosa Schiff, and his six-year-old son Oscar, took their bags and took off for France immediately. A family member told us that he just had recovered a bunch of diamonds, and therefore he had the means to flee. “Almost everywhere, at least some Jews managed to obtain papers to establish a false identity.”(Hilberg: 186) They too stayed in France under false names and with false identity papers. They first went to Beziers until November 1942, then to La Canourgue until April 1943, to Grenoble until January 1944 and to Isere Moirans until the liberation in August 1944. When the war in Europe was over, they decided to return to Belgium, where they arrived on June 18 1945.
The other family members decided to stay. The decision later on turned out to be fatal for most of them. In December 1940 most of them did as they were told, and inscribed themselves in the register for Jews. So did Edek Grunspan, one of Itta’s brothers, but suddenly (before December 1941) he decided to flee. He ended up in New York, where he died from liver cancer in 1950. Majer Hanfling, Ludovic Reichmans’ second wife’s son, was a bon vivant. On April 9 1942 he too decided to flee end ended up in France in Hotel Carlton in Nice, where he was caught at the end of August 1942, sent to Drancy, and from Drancy to Poland where he perished after November 3 1943. Coming from Krakau, he had entered Belgium on March 31 1938 and tried to emigrate to the United States, but this failed. Time and again he was warned to leave the country, until Hitler invaded Poland. He then got a temporary residence permit valid because of the changed international situation. The Belgian government understood that under these circumstances Jewish (and non Jewish) Polish citizens no longer could be expelled.
On February 17 1941 the then fifteen-year-old Paula Grosz, daughter of Zoltan and Myriam Reichman made a brave little statement. In a questionnaire about foreigners, we can read her answer to the question about being or not-being a political refugee. Bravely she answers: “Yes, I declare to be a Jew.”
Itta’s sister, Hella Grunspan, was married to Isaïas Altbaum. Being a Belgian Jew, born in Antwerp, “[il] a été mis au travail forcé dans le Nord de la France (O.T.). Il figure sur les listes de salaires (établis par quinzaines) de la firme ‘Max Pruh’ du 12.7.42 au 17.10.42, et de la firme ‘Julius Berger’ du 1.11.42 au 12.12.42.”
Gertrude Pakula, nurse-maid of Sylvie, Polish, but born in Germany and expelled from there in 1939, also got such an Arbeitseinsatzbefhel (AB), but not for OT, but for the East. She went to Malines and “willingly” turned herself in on August 5 1942. They inscribed her name with the addition, AB 03873. In the first months of 1941 – just like Igo Gross and his wife, like Hersz Nadel, his wife and son – as a German (or Austrian) Jew, who entered Belgium in 1938 or 1939, she had been deported already once to Limbourg to go and work there, but after several months she was allowed to return to Antwerp. We found a report that gives us more information about this often forgotten period: “Gertrude a été mis(e) en séjour forcé et surveillé dans le Limbourg à St-Trond du 21.12.1940 au 7.1.1941[, et] à Herk-de-Stad, Grote Markt, du 7.1.1941 au 5.4.1941… En vertu de l’ordonnance du 12.11.40: “Verordnung über Polizeiliche Massnahmen in bestimmten Gebieten Belgiens und Nordfrankreichs vom 12 November 1940”, plusieurs centaines de juifs d’Anvers, dès novembre 1940 furent l’objet d’une mesure massive d’expulsion et furent déportés dans le Limbourg. D’après une lettre émanant du Gouverneur de la Province du Limbourg, en date du 18.6.46, il appert qu’au début de 1941, sur l’ordre de l’autorité allemande, on hébergea des centaines d’Israélites, de diverses nationalités, dans plusieurs communes de la province du Limbourg. Ils y séjournèrent durant quelques mois à titre de “déportés obligatoires”. Au cours de l’année 1941 ils furent autorisés soit à retourner à Anvers, soit à se fixer dans certaines communes du Royaume (entre autres dans les communes de l’agglomération bruxelloise et Liège). En ce qui concerne les conditions de vie de ces Israélites, il résulte d’informations prises auprès des Administrations Communales, qu’ils étaient logés soit dans des maisons désaffectées, soit dans des écoles aménagées à cet effet, soit dans des baraquements. Ils pouvaient circuler librement à l’intérieur de la commune mais en aucun cas n’étaient autorisés à la quitter, et devaient se présenter régulièrement à la Maison Communale.” Having returned to Antwerp on April 5 1941, she started working again as a nurse-maiden for Sylvieke. Probably she thought that the Arbeitseinsatzbefhel (AB) of 1942 would be something similar to the work she had to do in Limbourg, and she was twenty years old and strong… On August 11 she was put on transport II to Auschwitz. This time, she didn’t return. Itta’s sister, Lina, did the same thing on August 21. She had the number AB 02205. Four days later they put her on transport V. Neither of them returned. “’We should commit an immense historical error were we to dismiss the main defence mechanisms employed by the victims… as mere symptoms of blindness or foolishness,’ wrote Louis de Jong. ‘Rather these defense mechanisms sprung from deep and inherent qualities shared by all mankind – a love of life, a fear of death’. We believe what we want, not what we see.” (Todorov: 245) “Denial of the terribleness of what is done can be helped by euphemisms. Jews deported to their death were ‘evacuated’, ‘resettled’, or ‘sent to the east’.” (Glover: 352)
With the assistance of the Antwerp Police the Germans held the first big raid on August 15 1942 in which especially those streets were cordoned off where the largest number of Jews lived. All Jews living in these streets were hunted down and rounded up. Men, women and children were “loaded” on trucks and carried away. A thousand Jews were picked up. On August 27 and 28 the Antwerp police cooperated again with the collective rounding up of all Jews in the cordoned area. Because some policemen had warned the Jews with pamphlets on August 27, Holm, head of the Judenabteilung of the Sipo-SD in Antwerp “obliged” the policemen to undertake the raid of August 28 on their own. No German would assist them! Some “natives” were prepared to point out the houses where the Jews housed… Not one of the police reports mentions “native” protest against the action of the police.” (Saerens: 610-615) If there would have been protest, it certainly would have been mentioned. One of the streets they cordoned off was the Plantin Moretuslei, the street where Benoit and Itta had their apartment at nr. 86. The fact that they weren’t arrested that night shows that perhaps they too had been warned by such a pamphlet the day before. That night in all at least 1,105 Jews were uprooted up from their homes and packed into the General Dossin de Saint-Georges barracks in Sammellager Malines. This small Flemish town is located halfway between Brussels and Antwerp where most of the Jews in this country live. This was where the Reich's Security detachment had set up its assembly camp. This Sammellager Malines was the starting point of a one-way deportation route.
On September 4, their brother-in-law, Zoltan Grosz, was picked up. Having been transferred to Malines he got a “AB/KV” behind his name, which means that the person was arrested by the Germans or their Flemish collaborators, and did not come “willingly” to the transit camp for Jews in Malines, after having received a summons (Arbeitseinsatzbefhel or AB) to make it for Malines. He had to go to Malines, but he decided not to, and then he was picked up. We know from Wilhelm Karfiol that he too ignored several summoning orders, until a policeman forced him to sign the receipt. But now they knew for certain where he was.
This means that from both sides of Sylvie Reichman’s family now, people had already disappeared. What would happen next? Who would be next? In a situation where everybody is panicking and emotionally disturbed, it must have been extremely difficult to consider rationally what would be the best thing to do.
On the day of the Jewish New Year, 9/11, the next big raid was held by the SS-Security police, the Flemish SS and the Feldgendarmerie. Again the Antwerp police would cooperate in this systematic arrest of Jews. It would take a whole day and would last for more than twenty-four hours. 1,422 Jewish men, women and children were picked up, the largest number ever rounded up in Belgium! Regine and Paula Reichman, two daughters of Eugène Reichman, who survived the war, told me that the Reichman brothers were summoned with a written order to report for conscription of labour for Organisation Todt (OT) in the north of France, which meant working on the construction of the Atlantic Wall, (but it is also possible that they got an order for Arbeidseinsatz in the East). According to them, the brothers decided to ask the Jewish Council for advice. The council advised to do as they were told, they say. If the brothers would report themselves willingly, their women and children could stay and would be safe. It is correct that a lot of people who got a Arbeitseinsatzbefehl, were afraid of reprisals against their family members if they didn’t obey. “The salient characteristic of the Jewish community in Europe during 1933-1945 was its step-by-step adjustment to step-by-step destruction. In this respect there was no difference between the Jewish leaders and ordinary Jews. The basic strategy of minimizing losses, which was the maxim of the Jewish councils, was mirrored in the adaptations of Jewish households. Be it at the community or family level, reserves were husbanded to maintain stability. Appeals were made to the authority for exemptions, extensions, or amelioration, but then pain and humiliation were accepted as the price of continued living. Some people, however, could not or would not make these adjustments. In one way or another they no longer cooperated with the perpetrator or with their own leadership. Although they differed in their deviations from the norm, they shared an essential attribute: they no longer played the prevailing game. The principal manifestations of such non-conformist behaviour were suicide, hiding, escape, and resistance. Most of these decisions were calculated, with or without extensive preparation, and many times they were the acts of individuals or of small groups of dissenters.” (Hilberg: 170) Apparently the Reichmans didn’t trust it completely. According to Regine Reichman, they instructed their spouses to find a safe place to hide, before reporting themselves. But they knew that they were running out of time. And suddenly there was 9/11.
On September 11 Benoit and Itta were picked up separately at two different times and at two different places, taken to the Central Station and transferred to Malines the day after. They arrived separately in the military barracks Dossin. We know this because they got different numbers, the four Reichman brothers were given consecutive numbers: Itta: 416; Eugène: 721; Joseph: 723; Benoit: 722 and Maurice: 720. After the war, Wilhelm Karfiol, a relative of Dobe Thaler and of Itta Grunspan as well, described what they had encountered in Malines: “The guards were SS-soldiers. Entering [Dossin] we were subjected to a body search by the SS-soldiers. I noticed that several women and men were beaten, to persuade them to hand over the goods they had hidden. For the rest I didn’t see other ill-treatments. This is what we got for food: once a day one loaf of bread of approximately one kilo for four persons, a little bit of jam, in the afternoon one litre water, soup that was uneatable. They allowed us to receive packages sent by the Jewish Council. We got the food, clothes and other goods. After we had been in Auschwitz for two days, these goods were taken away from us. In Malines we did not have to work. One of the days during my stay there, we had to do exercises as a punishment. One of the exercises was this: the men only had to crawl over the ground on their elbows and knees. The ground was made of burned cokes, so that our knees and elbows were bleeding.”
Four days later, they had to step on a train with carriages for passengers, not with cattle cars. In one carriage 70 people had to fit inside. Transport X left Malines on September 15 and arrived in Auschwitz on September 17. Wilhelm Karfiol, who was on the same train, probably in the same carriage as the Reichman brothers, describes the journey: “We were terribly thirsty. We had nothing to drink during the entire voyage – this was the worst of all. We only had two rations of bread plus tomatoes or jam. It was allowed to open the windows to have some air, and they provided places where one could fulfil one’s natural needs. When we got out of the train, we were beaten immediately and divided into the men who had to walk, and into the women, children, elderly (above 40 years of age) and sick men (who were classified with the women) who were sent to the gas chambers right away...” And he estimates that only one out ten arrivals was selected for work. “Most of the deportees didn’t enter the camp: they were led straight into the gas chambers, without any kind of registration.” (Klarsfeld & Steinberg: 11) “In the death camps, a reprieve was exceptional. It was granted to those who could perform work, some of it skilled and much of it heavy, to the extent that it was needed. In this selection, fewer women than men were spared from immediate gassing. Possibly a third of the Jews who survived were women.” (Hilberg: 130) The names of Itta and Benoit were not registered. It is possible that upon arrival in Auschwitz Eugène and Joseph were selected for work. We found two documents suggesting that Eugène might have died between March 23 and March 30 1943, and that Joseph died on January 9 1943. But in the end, none of the Reichman brothers returned, nor did Itta.
To accomplish the deportation to the death camp of Auschwitz, the Germans used deception and terror. “Resettlement in the East,” and, even later, labour camps were part of the fundamental lie used to deceive Jews concerning their fate. Those who were not immediately sent to the gas chambers were ordered to send postcards and letters home informing their families of their safe arrival, and of their tolerable living and working conditions. “This Nazi rule was particularly cruel in contrast to actual conditions,” says Fogelman. (1994: 44) From Birkenau, Wilhelm Karfiol wrote such cards to his wife, unaware of the fact that his wife already had been shot upon her arrest on April 15 1943. On June 4 1943 he wrote: “Liebe Berta! Teile dir mit daß ich gesund bin und daß es mir gut geht. Ich hoffe dasselbe von dir zu Hören. Warum hast du mir nicht auf meine drei Karten geantwortet. Ich grüsse dich wie auch unser Kinder. Euch Wilhelm. 1000 Kisse an Silvain und René sussi.” On July 25 1943 he wrote another card: “Liebe Berta! Ich freue mich das ich wieder an dir schreiben kan. Packete bis 3 kg kannst du mir jeder Zeit schicken mit einem dopelten Inhaltverzeichnis. Sonst nichts Neues als ich dich herzliche Grüße und Kisse. Grüsse an alle Bekante, Dein Wilhelm.”
Transport X was the last convoy for which they summoned the deportees, but that could only be accomplished by way of a new big raid. (Steinberg & Klarsfeld: 26) But there is something that makes us think that the Reichman brothers did not report themselves to the Germans, with their Arbeitseinsatzbefehl. First of all, the Jews who on Thursday evening September 10 had got such an order to go working on the Atlantikwall – a demand that was delivered by Antwerp policemen – were escorted to a waiting train, that left for France on September 12. (Saerens, 2000: 620) But there is no doubt: the Reichmans were sent to Malines, and not to France. Secondly, if they would have got an Arbeitseinsatzbefhel for the East, and they would have reported themselves “willingly”, as the story goes, then they would have been inscribed in Malines with “AB” and a number. But behind the Reichman brothers’ names, stands KV, which meant “Keine Vorladung” or “Keine Verfügung”, which means “without order”. All the Jews who got an Arbeitseinsatzbefhel, but didn’t report willingly, were rounded up with one of the big raids and got the KV behind their name.
Eugène Reichman threw a little card out of the window of the train with the address of his sister-in-law, Lipschitz, who was married to a Belgian Jew, with the following note that contained a warning: “Greetings from Malines”. The family members got the message, namely that the worst possible thing had happened, because those who were brought to Malines, didn’t return. Apparently for the time being the women and children could stay out of the hands of the Germans, except Itta. When she is rounded up, apparently Sylvieke is not with her. Why not? We will never know.
Eugène’s wife, Fanny Lipschitz, managed to flee from Antwerp and found a hiding place, first in Brussels, afterwards in Wallonia. One was for herself and one for her three girls, Regine, Paula and Céline. They all survived. We found out that on February 17 1942 Gottfried Finkel and his family moved to an apartment in a block, where Myriam Reichman already had lived for more than fifteen years. This explains perhaps how Myriam got into contact with Klaas Sluys by or before October 20. Because with her husband already arrested, she probably realised that she had to act as quickly as possible. She probably knew that Gottfried had a good contact with a Gentile, who was willing to help him and his family. Klaas’s daughter, Dora, said to me once: “That was a problem. You decided to help somebody [Gottfried Finkel], but then in no time a whole group appeared with the request to be helped.” We must understand that these people were really desperate. We probably would have done the same. October 20 is the day that Heinz Schindler gives as the day they had to move from Withof to another hiding place, to make room for other Jews. But in Klaas’ sentence we can read: “Im September 1942 wandte sich an[ ]den Angeklagten die jüdische Familie GROSS, bestehend aus der Mutter Maria Gross, und den 3 Kindern Alexander, Paula und Annie, geboren in den Jahren 1929, 1928 und 1926, mit der Bitte, um Gewährung von Unterkunft. Diese hatte Antwerpen verlassen, weil das Familienhaupt Zoltan GROSS seit dem 11.9.1942 [correction 4.9.1942] zur Arbeitseinsatz gebracht worden war und die übrigen Familienmitglieder das Gleiche für sich gefürchteten. Der Angeklagte nahm die Familie im September 14 Tage in seine Wohnung auf. Dann brachte er sie bis zur 15-1-1943 in eine von ihm gemietete Wohnung in Boechout, Hovesteenweg. Vom 15 – 30-1-1943, dem Tage der Verhaftung des Angeklagten, behergbergte er sie wieder in seiner Wohnung, weil sie im Hovesteenweg räumen musste[n]. Dies geschah, um die Familie GROSS zu verbergen.” Klaas hid her and her three children, Paula, Alexander and Annie, until their arrest on January 31 1943. To us it seems that September is more likely, because it explains that Myriam, certainly after the arrest of her brothers, didn’t wait any longer and looked for a hiding place. It is possible that she immediately brought parentless Sylvieke with her to Withof. It is possible that Dobe Thaler arrived a little later, because her husband, Joel, would only be arrested on September 29. Dora Sluys wrote us to say that Alexander played the guitar, and she felt very sad when Alex was gone.
Klaas found a seperate hiding place for Dobe in Hove, but Sylvieke stayed with Julia all the time, until Toine Rooze took her to Henri and Truus in Korbeek-Lo. Sylvie says, she still has a fragment of a heartbreaking memory, standing in a kitchen, and a woman in a bathrobe who, much against her will, hands her to a man. Until recently Sylvie thought that this was her mother, but I am convinced that this is a memory flash of a three-and-a-half year old girl, of the moment Julia handed her over to Toine, to escort her to the Roozes: “My earliest memory of that singular time was the morning I was sent away. It was a beautiful cold and crisp September [correction: May] morning full of sunshine. My mother [correction: Julia] had dressed me and placed me on the kitchen counter. At my side was a small suitcase. We were giggling and chatting, and she was playfully tapping my knee with the tassel of her bathrobe. I asked her where I was going, since she had obviously dressed me for a journey. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. She opened it, and there stood a stranger, a man [correction: Toine] I had never seen before. My mother [correction: Julia] lifted me into her arms and held me tight. She began to sob uncontrollably. I begged her to stop crying and explain what was wrong, but she pushed me into the stranger’s arms and said, “Go with him!” It was the last time I ever saw her.”
The big raids had been carried out with the help of the Belgian police. Now the second phase of the liquidation process started in which 20 SS-members and Feldgendarmen started rounding up Jews. On September 25 Maurice Reichman’s wife, Fuba Schvarz, was arrested together with Suzanne, her little girl of ten months, her mother and two of her sisters with their children. The day after, all of them were put on transport XI. A grandmother together with her daughters and her grandchildren vanished in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz.
Joel Grunspan, Sylvie’s grandfather, was arrested on September 29 1942, but the story goes that Joel’s wife, Dobe, was so ill, that the Germans thought that she was going to die very soon anyway, so they left her in her bed. But she recovered. At the same time they arrested Eisig Safir and Erna Grunspan, who might have been taking care of her ill mother. Meanwhile however Eisig and his wife had already managed to bring their children, Renée and Rose, into safety in a boarding school. On a “Formulaire de renseignements” we read that Erna, having no children with her, wasn’t killed immediately, but that she was selected for work: “partie le 10.10.42 vers valides: Gare de Kozel, de là à Gogolin (camps de passage) et puis camps de travail.” But she did not survive. Her daughters, Renée and Rose, however did survive, just like their father, who survived Auschwitz. At first he was supported by the Jewish Committee, but in 1947 he got a work permit, “because the demander testifies of moral and social values, and because he had enough capital and knowledge to practice the job of a diamond cutter.”
The wife of Joseph Reichman, Terry Klein and her ten- and eight-year-old children, André and Catharina, were arrested on October 8 1942, and two days later put on transport XIII. None of them returned either.
On October 10 1942 they arrested Monek Grunspan. On October 31 they put him on transport XVI. On December 7 1942 his brother-in-law, Isaïas Altbaum, escaped from the camp where he had to work on the construction of the Atlantikwall (OT). On his way to Belgium however, he unfortunately got caught and was sentenced to prison for 6 months for “Urkundenfälshung”. “Der Bestrafte ist am 7.12.1942 aus dem Lager Israel I bei Dannes, das der Organisation Todt zum Arbeitseinsatz zur Verfügung steht, geflüchtet und lernte auf seiner Flucht nach Antwerpen einen unbekannten Belgier kennen, der ihm die Identitätskarte des Jan Henri Pauwels Nr. A 39303, ausgestellt in Antwerpen, am 7.7.1942 für einen Preis von 1.000 .- Bfrs. verkaufte. Diese Identitätskarte hatte der vorgenannte Pauwels kurz vorher verloren. Der Bestrafte verfälschte diese Identitätskarte indem er das Geburtsjahr auf 1912 abänderte, und sein Lichtbild einklebte. Bei seiner am 12.3.1943 erfolgten Festnahme versuchte er sich mit diesem verfälschten Papier als arischer belgische Staatsangehöriger auszugeben. He was imprisoned in the prisons of Antwerp, St. Gilles, Merxplas. “Le 18.9.1943, il a été mis à la disposition de la Sicherheitsdienst d’Anvers et réincarcérer à la prison de cette ville du 18.9.1943 au 30.9.1943, date de son transfert au camp de Malines, d’où il a été déporté pour le camp de concentration d’Auschwitz le 15.1.1944. Il a séjourné au “Revier” du camp de Monowitz du 26.1 au 1.2.1944 et du 12.4.1944 au 27.4.1944 (matricule : 172.298). Il est décédé en un lieu inconnu le 27.4.1944.” This means he died in the “field hospital” or was selected to be gassed.
Ludovic Reichman, Sylvie’s grandfather, was arrested on January 28 1943, together with his second wife, the widow Feiga Glatt, whom he had married on January 6 1942, half a year after the death of his first wife, Fani, on June 27 1941. She was a widow who had fled Berlin and on May 9 1939 had crossed the Belgian border near Aachen by night. She literally walked away from “the persecution of Jews by the Gestapo”. On April 4 1943 they put them on transport XX. They didn’t return.
As we already know from Julia’s story, on January 31 1943 Myriam Reichman and her three children were arrested in Withof Boechout. We know that Myriam and her three children were questioned by members of the Gestapo in Antwerp. “Er [Klaas] bestreitet nur den Juden gesagt zu haben, dass sie bei einer Revision die wirkliche Dauer Ihres Aufenthaltes verschweigen sollten. Er wird hier aber durch die protokollierten Erklärungen der Familie Gross überführt, welche diese übereinstimmend angegeben hat.“ Two days later they transferred them from the Gestapo head quarters in Antwerp to Malines. They too were put on the famous transport XX, so on the same transport as her father and her stepmother. None of them returned either.
Hella Grunspan was not arrested until September 4 1943. The reason for this is, that she was married to a Belgian Jew, Isaïas Altbaum, and that she had acquired the Belgian nationality through her marriage. Belgian Jews were the last to be picked up. The first Jews that were rounded up were German and Polish Jews, those Jews that were considered as stateless, and Jews with the nationality of enemy states (except British and American Jews), later followed by the Dutch, Greek, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Belgian Jews. They arrested her, together with her one-year-old son, Jacques Sylvain. They didn’t return.
On September 5 1944 Korbeek-Lo was liberated, but Sylvieke remained with the Roozes until May 1945. Fanny Lipschitz, Eugène Reichman’s wife, survived the war, and visited Sylvieke, but as a widow she already had three children to look after. Sylvieke’s grandmother already took care of her grandchildren, Renée and Rose Safir. She understood that Sylvieke was in good hands, but in May 1945 she decided not to wait any longer, and she asked Truus Rooze to transfer Sylvieke to her, and to two of Sylvieke’s nieces. A few weeks later, her son-in-law, Eisig Safir, arrived. He had returned from Auschwitz but was so weak, that Dobe had to take care of him too. It took him months to recover physically. They formed a new kind of family, until Dobe decided to join her daughter Charlotte in the United States, taking Sylvieke with her, because Charlotte and Lobel Lachter were prepared to adopt the orphan girl. At one time they even thought of adopting the girls Safir as well, and that Danuta Karfiol and her husband Henryk Diamant could come over from Poland to Belgium to help her grandmother with the children, until they all together would leave for the United States. But Danuta and Henryk don’t get their visa. Eisig Safir stayed in Belgium with his two daughters.
Because Dobe died shortly after her immigration in 1948, and at that time Sylvieke was still a little girl, because her adoptive parents moved without informing the Rooze’s, the contact with the families of the rescuers was lost. When Sylvie visited her aunt Fanny in Belgium in 1986, she made a phone call to the Roozes. But unfortunately, at the same time, they were on a tour in Israel, and the phone was answered by a couple of friends who were in their home but didn’t speak any English, and didn’t understand at all to whom they were talking on the phone. Sylvie concluded that the Roozes didn’t live there anymore. On May 27 2005, with the assistance of the Registry of Holocaust Survivors of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, I could trace her. Sylvie gives lectures about the holocaust. The day after my first phone conversation with her, she sent me an e-mail in which she tells what became of her:
After the war my aunt came to Antwerp to bring my grandmother and me to America… I was adopted by her in 1947 and lived with her and her husband and two children in Brooklyn, NY. My aunt was a cruel woman and I was physically and mentally abused throughout my childhood and adolescence. It was emotionally worse for me coming to America to live with this family than it was all during the war. We moved to California and I went to high school in Beverly Hills. My stepfather was comfortable, not rich, but there was no love in the home, especially for me, so this period of time was bitter for me. I “escaped” this horror by going away to university at the University of California at Berkeley, outside of San Francisco, where I graduated in 1962. I worked my way through school and never went home again. Today I no longer have any contact with my stepsister, and speak with my stepbrother only twice a year, on our respective birthdays.
I married my husband, Oliver, also a refugee from Antwerp, when I was still studying in graduate school at Berkeley. We moved to Connecticut, then New Jersey, and then New York. I was a housewife for many years, because I wanted to be the perfect mother to our two daughters, since I never had a mother of my own. I finally went back to school in New York for a Master's Degree when our daughters were in high school. I became an antique dealer, and about ten years ago I became an actress doing commercials, which I still do. Both daughters are married, but we still have no grandchildren. We are hoping this will happen soon, but so far the daughters are not cooperating.
On February 2 2006 she wrote to me: “Well, I do belong to someone now – my husband and two daughters. But I had been forced to abandon three [correction: four, namely her parents, and the families Sluys, Rooze and Safir] families before I was 7 years old. My husband, through his love, has enabled me to heal from the losses of the past.”
Sylvieke lost her parents, three of her grandparents, seven uncles and seven aunts, eight nephews and cousins, and her nurse-maid in the Shoa. One aunt and her three children survived because they were hidden in Wallonia; one uncle, an aunt and their son had fled in time and managed to survive the war in France taking a false identity; one cousin survived miraculously in Poland. And one way or another one uncle, who was a bachelor, survived as well.
4.2.2.2 Hersz Nadel
“Jews who lived in what was designated as Greater Germany during the Third Reich, that is, prewar Germany [Hersz Nadel for example] and Austria [Igo Gross for example]; almost all of these Jews were highly assimilated, spoke German, and lived dispersed throughout society, without distinctive dress or customs; many were not observant… Jews kept hoping that the Hitler regime would not last, or, at the very least, that it would moderate its anti-Semitic policies. This wishful thinking was reflected in fluctuations in the rate of emigration, which dropped whenever there was an apparent halt or moderation in the regime’s anti-Semitic activity. For example, 37,000 Jews left in the initial rush of emigration in 1933, but only 23,000 emigrated in 1936, when the Olympic Games were being held in Berlin and the Nazis put on a benevolent face for foreign visitors.” (Jones: 176) “Each prospective refugee family had to find a place of refuge and had to make its own decision to leave… Those who depended on salaries or wages faced the external barriers erected by immigration countries suffering from high unemployment rates… In fact, the refugee outflow decreased year by year from 1933 through 1937, and it moved up sharply only in 1938 and 1939. Several developments accounted for the sudden upward thrust. One was the annexations of Austria in March 1938. Another was the precipitous outbreak of violence on November 10 1938. For twenty four hours, from midnight to midnight, synagogues were burned down, shop windows of Jewish stores were smashed, and Jewish families were forcibly evicted from their apartments. Over twenty-five thousand Jewish men were delivered to the concentration camps Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where most of them were held for a period of weeks or months. (Hilberg: 118, 119) “[The so-called Kristallnacht] marked the first state-sanctioned violence against the Jews, occasioned the first mass internment of Jewish men by the SS, and intensified the confiscation of Jewish wealth. The goal of all these measures was to force German Jews to emigrate, and 330,000 of them did so before the outbreak of the war in 1939.” (Oliner & Oliner: 22) “Shortly after this upheaval, a series of decrees spelled out the end of all Jewish enterprises and the concomitant loss of jobs in the Jewish labour force to these firms. It is then that the Jews sought any haven, be it Cuba, Japanese-occupied Shangai, or a neighbouring country with porous borders, like Belgium, France, and Italy, which could be entered with a temporary visa or illegally… In the West, the refugees from Germany and Austria were the new stateless people.” (Hilberg: 119, 227, 168) “Additionally, most foreign countries had severe restrictions that hampered German Jews trying to immigrate”. (Jones: 176) Belgium tried to shut her borders for Jewish refugees too. One of the consequences of the great amount of Jewish refugees in Belgium was the rise of anti-Semitic feelings.
Hersz Nadel, born in Poland and for decades living and working in Berlin as a soft furnisher, was arrested in November 1938 during the so-called Kristallnacht and shipped off to Dachau. Despite his Polish nationality, he was considered by the Germans as a stateless person, and therefore expelled from Germany, just like his wife, Esthera Neuman, and their two sons, Max and Manfred. They just managed to flee to Belgium, and they already got the order to leave the country. If he did not leave, the police would arrest him and put him back over the border with Germany. He wrote letters to explain the situation and to ask for more time. As a Polish citizen he needed official documents from the Polish Government, to be able to emigrate to the United States, but the Polish Government considered him no longer as a Polish citizen, because he had left Poland about twenty years earlier. So they didn’t want to give him the official documents he needs to be able to emigrate to the United States. On July 17 1939 he wrote in one of his letters to the Administration of the Public Security:
Voici les raisons qui auraient peut-être en faveur d’une suite favorable de la requête présente : C’est dans des circonstances vraiment tragiques que nous avons été forcé de quitter précipitamment l’Allemagne et fuir vers la Belgique. –En effet, c’est dans des souffrances indicibles que j’ai passé un nombre des mois dans le camp de concentration à Dachau, d’où j’ai été libéré un jour à condition et sous menace de mort de quitter avec ma famille sur le champ l’Allemagne.
Nous sommes à présent dans l’impossibilité absolue de nous rendre en Pologne, ce pays, que nous n’avons plus vu depuis 30 ans et d’où la dénaturalisation doit nous parvenir dans les jours prochains.
Il est de la plus grande importance d’autre part de vous signaler, que nous sommes en possession, ceci avec preuves à l’appui, des documents d’immigration aux Etats-Unis se trouvant au Consulat d’Anvers. – L’autorisation pour entrer dans ce pays nous parviendra nul doute dans le courant de cette année.
Dans l’intention de corroborer cette déclaration qu’il me soit permis pour ce fin de joindre à la présente notre No. de l’Enregistrement ainsi que le lettre de Londres du German Jewish Immigration Department, d’où il ressort que nous nous donnons la peine d’entrer entre temps et si possible à Londres, mais où nous pouvons nous rendre seulement au moment de l’obtention de l’autorisation pour les Etats-Unis.
Il n’est pas non plus à sous-estimer le fait, également avec preuves à l’appui, que nous vivons UNIQUEMENT de notre propre avoir sans importuner donc l’une ou l’autre institution officielle ni le Comité même…
We were shocked to find a note from August 7 1939 in which the decision is prepared to expel Hersz Nadel and his family from Belgium: “Prière au 1er bureau de donner les ordres nécessaires pour la mise en demeure de quitter le Royaume dans un délai de 30 jours avec ordre d’arrestation. Lors de l’arrestation éventuelle de l’intéressé, le 3e bureau donnera les instruction nécessaires à la prison pour le transférér, par correspondance extraordinaire, avec sa famille, à la frontière allemande.” But on September 1 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. For the moment Nadel got the permission to stay in Belgium. He wrote another letter: “Puisque notre séjour en Belgique tire à sa fin le 31-9-1939 et que nous sommes en possession des documents d’immigration pour l’Amérique et que nous avons compté, avec sûreté, recevoir la visa au cours du mois de janvier et février, nous vous demandons de bien vouloir nous accorder le séjour. Aussi nous avions dû tenir compte, les derniers jours, de la dénaturalisation de la Pologne, dont les documents ad hoc sont exposés à la Sûreté Publique. Vu, que toute immigration est suspendue par les dernières complications politiques nous vous prions de prendre connaissance de notre situation actuelle et de notre vœu. C’est aussi avec grand plaisir que je puis vous faire savoir que je me suis volontairement disposé aux supérieures belges, le 1er septembre 1939, dont le numéro de ma déclaration est 1925…”
Germany invaded and conquers Belgium in May 1940. “About 100,000 refugees in countries surrounding Germany were subsequently trapped by German armies. Exposed and vulnerable, these Jews were ideal victims during the first roundups to death camps.” (Hilberg: 124) We found a declaration of insolvency of August 22 1940. They had run out of money and they had no other financial resources. The family now got 8,268 Bfr. (or about € 5,200) a year from the Public Commission for the Needy. At the beginning of 1941 the family was deported to Diepenbeek in Limbourg, and forced to work there. When in May 1941 they were allowed to return, Hersz, his wife and youngest son, Manfred, choose for Antwerp. His oldest son, Max, went to Schaerbeek. This choice might have saved his life. He “dives”. On August 15 1942 Estera Neuman and Manfred were taken from their beds in Provinciestraat 125, one of the streets that was cordoned off and searched through systematically. At that time, Hersz must have been already hospitalized in Stuyvenberg Hospital and was kept there by Jeanne Schuyten (and some of her colleagues?) until January 28 1943. Because it is became too dangerous, she brought Hersz to Klaas and Julia. When three days later Hersz was arrested at Withof, he was questioned by the Gestapo to know where he had been hiding before his arrival in Boechout. In a document we can read : “Nadel Hersz a été incarcéré à la prison d’Anvers du 31.1 au 5.3.43 date à laquelle il a été transféré au camp de Malines.” This is a long time. He must have been questioned more than once, and his questioners of the Sipo-SD were known for their brutality. In Klaas’ sentence we can read that he had only arrived with Klaas on January 28, (if the date is correct, because it is almost unreadable) but does he say so, because according to the same sentence, Klaas had asked to say that they had just arrived the day before? “(Laut Aussage einer der Kinder GROSS) hatte Angeklagte die Juden unterrichtet, dass sie bei einer Festnahme sagen sollten, sie wären erst den Abend vorher zu dem Angeklagten gekommen.” We don’t know. Anyway, he does not say a thing about who helped him to hide. He did not betray anybody. Jeanne never got in trouble for being a brave rescuer.
Max did survive the war. He died in Israel in 2003, but his wife Hana Gnasic is still alive. I could trace her with the assistance of the Embassy of Israel in Brussels. She too is a survivor. During the war she worked for Mrs. Degrelle Korner, the sister of the Walloon SS-Obersturmführer at the Waffen-SS, Léon Degrelle. When Mr. Korner found out that she was Jewish, he didn’t turn her in! On the contrary, Hana managed to get her Jewish mother employed by the family Korner as a kitchen help. And, as Hana told us, her father, Elias Gnazik, was one of the brave who jumped out of the train of transport XX, and survived, just like Igo Gross, the same transport on which her future father-in-law was deported to Auschwitz. Hana and her husband always thought that Hersz was picked up from his bed at the Stuyvenberg Hospital. To her it made all the difference knowing that there had been people like Jeanne, Klaas and Julia who really tried to save him.
4.2.3 Conclusion
What did we learn? “For Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, survival was as much a matter of chance as of skill and environment.” (Oliner, 1998: 685) I agree. First, the Jews we have studied were ordinary people like you and me, and the survivors are not larger-than-life figures. Before the war several Jews, like Igo Grosz and his wife, Karl Kron and his wife, Hersz Nadel, his wife and his two sons, Gertrude Pakula, Feiga Glatt… fled from Germany or Austria. Some of them wanted to go to the United States, but that was not so easy. The Polish Government wouldn’t cooperate, and the Belgian Government tried to summon them to leave our country as soon as possible. They even threatened to arrest them and to put them over the border with Germany, a country some of them, like Karl Kron, had left, signing a document, in which they promised to never return to Germany again! Those people had already left everything behind. When Germany invades Belgium, the got trapped. Few of the Jews in our study, like Alexander Reichman, decided to flee immediately. Igo Gross, suspected because he is an Austrian, was arrested by the Belgian police, the first day of the war and brought to France. Some of them, like Edek Grunspan, fled in time. Others, like Edith Hönig, tried but had to return after some of them got caught.
Some tried to find help to hide themselves, and especially to hide their children. Some of them, like Eisig Safir and Fanny Lipschitz succeed in finding safe hiding places for their children. Others failed or were arrested after a while, like Myriam Reichman. If you had financial resources, like Alexander Reichman or Sigmund Hönig, you were able to pay for food and other expenses. Sigmund Hönig was prepared to pay for the family Finkel, who was not so fortunate. A lot of them, like Igo Gross who was questioned by the Gestapo, and who jumped out of a train, Eisig Safir who survived Auschwitz, Heinz who saw that his parents were being arrested, and who, after Debra and Lauterborn had picked up the Jews with Charles Hendricks, was put on the street by Door Hendrickx together with nine others. He would find the way to a new and safe hiding place in Brussels by contacting his aunt Julia Felderbaum. The way Edith Hönig describes the hiding on the apartment in Brussels is a strong example of character and the power of one’s imagination. This is skill.
But you needed a lot of luck too. Some had it, others did not. Rosalie Berlstein wasn’t recognized as Jewish by the German who opened the door of the toilet she was sitting on. Hersz Nadel on the other hand couldn’t get to the United States because the Polish Government didn’t want to cooperate soon enough. If they had done so, he and his family would have survived, because he had the required affidavits and at that time he still had the financial means. This is tragic.
Willy Berler, survivor of transport XX, explains in his book Itinéraire dans les ténèbres why it could make a big difference if you for example had no children with you: “Nous voyageons pendant quatre jours et trois nuits, du 19 au 22 avril. Puis le train s’arrête définitivement. C'est l’aube, nous sommes sur un quai de gare, sans aucun doute Auschwitz. Les portes ouvertes, je suis pressé de sortir du wagon obscur. Et je ressens, à ce moment, un intense soulagement d'être seul, car il y a là sur le quai, sortant pêle-mêle des wagons, des familles avec des enfants, des bébés; et aussi des vieillards, et des couples âgés! Moi, je suis seul dans cette aventure, mes parents sont en Roumanie, je pense qu'ils sont protégés là-bas. Il est tout à fait clair que toute mon expérience de la déportation a été, et est encore maintenant, profondément conditionnée par cette chance que j'ai eue d'avoir été déporté seul, sans vieux parents ni femme ni enfant, que je n'aurais pu sauver... » (Berler: 71) This explains why none of the mothers who accompanied children survived. Together with their children they were directed to the gas chambers immediately. These women had no choice and no chance. “Après la sélection, 879 hommes et femmes, notamment toutes les personnes âgées (la limite, qu'on ne connaît pas avec certitude et qui est changeante, fluctue autour de cinquante ans), tous les enfants et les mères accompagnées d'enfants, sont tués dans les chambres à gaz. 276 hommes sélectionnés pour le travail obtiennent les numéros 117 455 à 117 730, et 245 femmes les numéros 42 451 à 42 695; ils sont enregistrés dans les camps du complexe d'Auschwitz. 63 % des déportés sont donc gazés immédiatement, et 37 % affectés au travail, ce qui est une “ bonne” proportion! A titre de comparaison, le même jour, dans un convoi de 2800 juifs grecs du ghetto de Salonique, on sélectionne pour le travail 255 hom¬mes et 413 femmes; les 2132 autres hommes, femmes et enfants, soit le 76 % du convoi, sont envoyés directement à la mort. Le XXe convoi belge comptera également une “bonne” propor¬tion de rapatriés (150 sur 1400). Ce taux de survie de 10,7 % - sans compter les évadés - est dû, entre autres, au fait que de nombreuses femmes ont été sélectionnées pour les expériences médicales.” (Klarsfeld & Steinberg: 30, 31) “Pour évoquer le contexte d'extermination dans lequel se situe l'ar¬rivée du XXe convoi, on peut préciser qu'en avril 1943, deux des qua¬tre grands complexes crématoire-chambre à gaz (II et IV) viennent d'être mis en service à Birkenau, avec une capacité, respectivement, de 3000 et 1500 corps par jour. Le mois d'avril 1943 voit arriver à Auschwitz 27 321 juifs, essentiellement grecs, dont 20 444 sont envoyés immé¬diatement à la mort à leur arrivée, soit le 74,8 %. Trois déportés sur quatre peuvent donc être considérés comme condamnés à mort dès l'instant où ils montent dans les wagons. Le 22 avril 1943 plus précisé¬ment, 3011 juifs ont été tués dans le centre d'extermination d'Auschwitz¬-Birkenau, sans compter ceux qui, dans les divers camps du complexe concentrationnaire, ont succombé aux sévices et à la maladie” (Berler : 71) This equals the number of casualties of the attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11!
I became convinced about the fact that to flee, to jump out of a train, to hide, to put yourself together again time and again by inventing games, lessons, not to betray others if you’re questioned by members of the Gestapo in a brutal way… are to be considered as acts of resistance, of not obeying the occupier and his collaborators. Obeying the Germans was the fastest way to a certain death. Those, like Gertrude Pakula and Lina Grunspan who got an Arbeitseinsatzbefehl, and who willingly went to Malines to present themselves. They didn’t return. But a lot of the others testified by their acts their sense of responsibility, self-reliance and the willingness to take risks, openness to new experiences; and positive self-evaluation. In my opinion it is not a coincidence that a lot of the characteristics of rescuers are similar to those of survivors. Both groups are the opposite of indifferent bystanders, because both groups (anticipate and) act, instead of waiting for what comes next. There is one big difference however. Potential rescuers could say no. The Jews had no choice. They were hunted down just because of the fact that they were Jewish.
4.3 The perpetrators and their deeds
“A perpetrator is any person who knowingly took part in the process of destruction of the European Jews, whether by (1) ordering, authorizing, or planning the killing, (2) directly participating in the killing itself, or (3) knowingly making an essential contribution to the killing.” (Jones: 123) We aim “to understand what they did and did not do, and, through careful comparisons, to examine the choices available to contemporaries… On the one hand, [we do] not assume that making the ‘right’ choices would have necessarily changed the cause of the Holocaust. On the other, [we recognize] that the Holocaust was not inevitable – it is possible to become mesmerised by the horrible, huge fact that it happened and was not stopped, and to accept, in a perverse way, the warped internal logic of the Nazis themselves that it needed to happen. Instead, it needs to be recognised that the Holocaust was made possible by both the action of the scores of thousands of perpetrators and the inaction of millions of bystanders.” (Bloxham & Kushner, 2005:12) “We will know who, what, and when, but we will not have asked the really important question: Why?... The murder was committed by humans for reasons whose sources are found in history and which can therefore be rationally analyzed… A historian cannot judge historical events only by their outcome but has to take intentions and attitudes into account.” (Bauer: xiv, 7, 128)
A good example is Kriegsgerichtsrat Dr. Baudisch’s reaction on Klaas’s defence. At his trial, Klaas is very clear about the reason why he helped and hid Jews: “Über die Beweggründe zu seiner Handlungsweise äussert sich der Angeklagte dahin, dass er als Christ aus Mitgefuhl gehandelt habe.” Baudisch’s answer gives us a view about his personal conviction, a conviction shared by many Nazi’s, that explains why Baudish passes sentence on Klaas: “[D]ie Beherbergung der Juden ist eine schwere Gesetzesverletzung. Der Angeklagte musste sich sagen, dass er die Juden nicht nur dadurch den notwendigen Verhaltungsmassnahmen entzog, sondern auch bei der bekannten Einstellung dieser Rasse die Sicherheit der Besetzungsmacht gefärhrdete, weil die Juden in dieser Verfassung zu allen möglichen Gesetzwiedrigkeiten, wie Spionage, Sabotage, und ähnlichen benutzt werden können. Das gilt insbesonders für den Juden Nadel, der dem Angeklagten gänzlich unbekannt war. Auch die angeblichen Beweggründe des Angeklagten können mildernd nicht ins Gewicht fallen. In harten Kriegszeiten ist für derartige Gefühle kein Raum, wenn sie sich so offensichtlich gegen sichtige Anordnungen der Besatzungsmacht richten.” This quote confirms the incorporation of the darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas into the Nazi belief system, namely “his rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Self-creation required hardness toward oneself: and a strong will imposing coherence on conflicting impulses. It also required hardness towards others. [The Nazis made hardness towards others the test of a strong will.] Conflicts between the self-creative projects of different people made inevitable the attempt to dominate others. The whole of life was a struggle in which victory went to the brave and to the strong-willed. Noble human qualities, linked with the will to exercise power, were brought in combat but atrophied in peace. Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception [and misplaced sentimentality]. The Judaeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison. In drawing these consequences from his beliefs about the death of God and from Social Darwinism, Nietzsche provided the part of the Nazi belief system which ‘justified’ the cruel steps they took to implement their other beliefs. The title of Leni Riefenstahl‘s film Triumph des Willens caught the side of Nazism which echoed Nietzschean self-creation. German renewal was the self-assertion of a national will and those who took part in it were seen as creating themselves anew, their own wills growing strong as they triumphed over the constraints of a discarded morality. The choice of conflict and hardness over compassion was central to the Nazi outlook… [H]ardness and inhumanity were seen as desirable, aspects of an identity that expressed ‘the will to create mankind anew’… Because of their system of belief, the central Nazi psychological projects were the substitution of hardness for sympathy and the reconstruction of moral identity.”(Glover: 325-326, 327) And in this respect they form the opposite of the deeds of the rescuers.
4.3.1 The leaders
“The first and foremost perpetrator was Adolf Hitler himself. He was the supreme architect of the operation; without him it would have been inconceivable.” (Hilberg: ix) “This is the real force behind Ian Kershaw’s judgment that without Hitler the Holocaust would have been ‘hardly conceivable’, underlining the extremity of Hitler’s personal anti-Semitism but also the realisation that only by the historical happenstance of that particular individual being propelled into a position of supreme power could the German state have taken the road that it did, irrespective of the general colour and strength of German anti-Semitism at the time. At the most fundamental level, the peculiar extent and nature of the anti-Semitism of Hitler and his Nazi party milieu determined that Jews were singled out for particular attention.” (Bloxham & Kushner: 63-64) “Despite avoiding written orders, despite never witnessing a single murder, despite never committing violence himself, Hitler was the prime mover of genocide. Participants described extermination orders as ‘Führer orders’… From 1919 a call to eliminate both Jews and Bolsheviks from an expanded German Reich pervaded Hitler’s speeches, the two volumes of Mein Kampf, and his recorded ‘table talk.’ Only the timing of eastward expansion and the method of elimination remained to be determined.” (Mann: 191)
“How did Nazism, which led to all this, win so much support? In a mixture of great psychological power, it combined tribalism and belief. Nazism’s emotional power came from tribalism: the ‘bent twig’ resentful nationalism created by the outcome of the First World War. The sense of national humiliation was fertile ground for Nazism. The Nazi project of national renewal gave many people beliefs and the hope of glory. Its belief system was a mixture of Social Darwinism and ideas from Nietzsche. Social Darwinism gave ‘scientific’ authority to tribalism and from Nietzsche came a belief in will, strength and power, together with a rejection of Judeo-Christian morality. Any successful movement needs a message people are willing to hear, but some movements more than others are the creation of a particular leader. Hitler’s ideas were Nazism and at their core was nationalism… Hitler blamed the defeat [of Germany in World War I] on a stab in the back, the betrayal of those at the front by Jewish agitators for revolution… The nationalism was tribal, based not on a shared culture but on racial unity… [Their version of national self-assertion and renewal] required the avenging of 1918 and the seizing of Lebensraum, living space for a united German nation. It also required exclusion of the Jews, who were supposedly responsible for the stab in the back… Nazi tribalism differed from other versions in having the backing of a supposedly ‘scientific’ system of beliefs. This was crucial in turning resentment into genocide. (Glover: 317, 318, 319, 320, 321) “[T]he Holocaust developed out of a (humanly) consistent Nazi commitment to anti-Semitism and its numerous policy implications. This commitment animated and guided, from early on, the thinking and the actions of Hitler and many of his followers. This produced an early, inner logic of mass murder, a potent though preformed (and, for many, preconscious) invention which, for all its initial diffuseness, remained at the heart of action and later developments… The perpetrators may indeed have obeyed their first orders mechanically, without involving their own value system, but sustained conformity could only be achieved by the regime because it adherents internalized the legitimacy and the necessity, if not the a priori desirability, of Nazi policies and their own part in them… After the first moment of perhaps unthinking compliance, the perpetrators essentially obeyed themselves, and therein lay the strength of the regime.” (Zukier: 201, 202) And Todorov agrees with Zukier: “[W]hat the totalitarian regime cannot bring about in reality it brings about in the mind of its subjects, therein lies its strength.” (Todorov: 240-241)
“Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime gradually impoverished the Jews and called for their emigration. At this point the Jewish community organizations increased their welfare work and tried to facilitate the departure of families, children, and adolescents. By 1938 this machinery was taken over by the Gestapo… In Austria, which was annexed in March 1938, almost all the Jews lived in Vienna. The Jewish community leaders in the city were immediately placed under arrest, and the SS brought in a ‘practitioner’ who would know what to do with them. The practitioner was Adolf Eichman… Most of Austria’s Jews [like Igo Gross and Rosalie Berlstein; and Karl Kron and Anna Hönig] emigrated in 1938 and 1939, but the large majority of the remainder were deported in 1941 and 1942, with the diligent assistance of the [Jewish] community machinery.” (Hilberg: 107, 108) “The goal of mass emigration, which was pursued and intensified in 1938 and 1939, was feasible only for Germany and newly annexed Austria. It was no longer realistic, after the outbreak of war, for occupied western Poland, which had a much larger Jewish community. A major resettlement scheme, involving the movement of all the European Jews to the French island colony of Madagascar, was briefly considered by the Foreign Office and other agencies after the fall of France, but this plan could not be materialize while Britain was still at war with Germany. Thus the two-year period after the beginning of the Second World War marks a period of uncertainty in the course of which additional measures, including ghettoization in Poland, were taken against the Jews in German-dominated Europe, but with only a nebulous conception of the ultimate purpose of these increasingly stringent steps… There is no particular moment or day that can be identified as the turning point in the interplay between preparations of scheming functionaries and Hitler’s own utterances. We may assume a period of irresolution, followed by this cryptic intimations and predictions. We may also surmise that finally he articulated the unmistakable words that even his SS and Police chief Heinrich Himmler called frightful. The words were not recorded, but they were alluded or referred to over and over. They were used repeatedly to counter arguments put forward by German and non-German authorities for exemptions or delays. The final solution was not evadable; it was the Führer’s will.” (Hilberg: 15, 16) “War made opposition to Hitler impossible.” (Mann: 194)
“There is increasing evidence, gleaned in part from the discovery of his appointments diary in the Moscow ‘special archive’, of ‘Himmler’s direct involvement in driving the murder process, often after meetings with Hitler… Himmler also contrived in that fateful half year [of 1942] to accelerate vastly the deportation of western European Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands to the extermination centres… During the war, as head of the RSHA’s Jewish desk, he [Eichmann] and his subordinates orchestrated or facilitated the deportation of the Jewish communities of southern, western and central Europe, primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau… The orchestrated deportations from Western Europe to distant killing fields by necessity had a more bureaucratic character, but we have already seen that the numbers thus murdered [in countries like Belgium, France…] were relatively small; it seems that the focus on the bureaucratic side of the ‘final solution’ owes much to the misleading Holocaust metanarrative and its overriding emphasis on trains to Auschwitz… The Nazi machinery of destruction accommodated both planning and direct brutality and got its flavour from the combination: this, not the trope of bureaucratic organisation, is what made the genocide into a genuine state project, incorporating all social and attitudinal levels.” (Boxham & Kushner: 136, 137, 153, 155, 156)
“The destruction of the Jews was European-wide… When Germany moved north, west, south, and east to occupy territories, German civilian personnel, army garrisons, and police in these regions were spread thin. The occupation regime could be an overseer, and it could provide a core of the enforcement mechanisms, but it could seldom act alone to maintain basic services and public order. Still less could it rely wholly on its own resources for such tasks as the confiscation of harvests, the impressment of labour, the combating of partisans, and the guarding or killing of Jews. For all these missions, German agencies employed local mayors, indigenous police, and assorted militia. The non-German helpers were approved holdovers, or newly recruited, or, sometimes, self-organized. Not unexpectedly, they also varied in their motivations. Some of these men wanted to avoid hard physical labour; others wanted privileges or prestige; still others were inspired by conviction; but in essence they all served voluntarily.” (Hilberg: 87) “Part of the appeal of the SS to relatively unsuccessful people was that they were able to feel appreciated and important… Nazi supporters felt their lives were given meaning by becoming part of a shared project, which in turn was justified by a system of beliefs which had deep emotional roots.” (Glover: 362, 394) And this is exactly what happened to those who applied for a job at the Sipo-SD headquarters.
The Sipo-SD in Antwerp
After defining the Jews, and after their identification, registration, exclusion from economic life and public appearance, isolation and concentration, by the summer of 1942 the time had come for their arrest, deportation and extermination by the Sicherheitsdienst. On June 11 1942 there was a meeting at the Judenabteilung in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst in Berlin. Adolf Eichman chaired this meeting with the Belgian, French and Dutch Sipo-SD delegates. They decided from mid July or beginning August 1942 time and again “zum Arbeitseinsatz in das Lager Auschwitz abzufordern”: 40.000 Jews from France and Holland, and 10.000 from Belgium. (Saerens: 504) This was a job for the Sipo-SD. The Sipo-SD Aussendienststelle Antwerpen subordinated to the Sipo-SD Dienststelle Brüssel.
On July 14 1942 only 29 years old Hauptssturmführer SS and Kriminal-Kommissar Dr. Max Werner came from the Reichssicherheitsamt (RSHA) in Berlin to the Sipo-SD in Antwerp. His age might surprise us, but most of the top Gestapo and SD leaders were under 36! He had become the new Dienststelleleider. After the war Debra and Schuermans collaborated with the Military Court hoping to get a minor sentence. Both wrote a complete report on the working of the Sipo-SD in Antwerp, with descriptions of the outlook and behaviour of all the German and Flemish collaborators and minimizing their own contribution. About Werner, Debra writes: “He was very active, especially in dangerous actions like the arrest of lots of communists, partisans, terrorists, members of the White Brigade [a resistance group] in one time. “Other characteristics [than depth of ideological commitment] were important, particularly drive, ambition, ruthlessness, initiative, and also an eye for the main chance.” (Boxham & Kushner: 125, 127) Werner was such a man. In civil life, he was a lawyer in Saarbrucken. [A lot of leaders of the Sipo-SD had a university degree, with a concentration in law.] He was the special chief of the Executiver Dienst or Gestapo, and he also had the final responsibility of the Politischer Dienst, that was directed by the thirty-one year old Desselmann. In civil most functionaries of the Gestapo were Kriminalbeamten. There were twenty German functionaries, women included, twenty Flemish ones, and four Flemish drivers, who were directed by a German garage manager.” On April 16 1943 Werner was shot and killed, together with Desselmann, by Korsick, another member of the Gestapo, who had just come from Poland and had been treated for a nervous breakdown. According to Debra, Korsick would have come to the conclusion that both leaders did not presented themselves as national-socialists, but that they made too much fun and that they spent too much money, instead of being concerned with the service. This does not surprise me. Many members of the Antwerp Gestapo liked to drink, to feast, to hang around in bars, spending a lot of money. Because several members were exercising their job “Ehrenamtlich”, which means as “an honorary post”, and because they were not paid for it, they had to find other financial resources. They organised a system whereby they arrested Jews, and went back afterwards to steal everything these Jews had left behind. The money, diamonds, gold and stocks and shares they found were (probably not always and not completely) delivered to the Devizenschutzkommando – the service that was responsible for the robbery of Jewish goods and properties and of “hostile fortunes” – and then they received a receipt, and a payment order for 10% of the value; so we could say that most of them worked on a commission basis. The more Jews they arrested, the more they earned. Theirs was an ongoing greed, and the chiefs also benefited from the system, even though this behaviour completely contravened the official SS-doctrine: “Himmler… attached great importance to SS-members not stealing anything from Jews for themselves, in contract to the ease with which he felt he could justify their other actions: ‘We had the moral right vis-à-vis our people to annihilate this people who wanted to annihilate us. But we have no right to take a single fur, a single watch, a single mark, a single cigarette, or anything whatever.’” (Glover: 357-358) But according to Debra, other Gestapo members suspected SS-Oberscharführer and Kriminalassistent Erich Holm, the very brutal and bestial head of the Antwerp Judenabteilung, to have gathered a fortune by stealing it from the Jews. He even would have encouraged his colleagues to do so. And his brutality was confirmed by Jan Schuermans: “Holm was a perfect brute towards the Jews. He would always do most of the talking, is very diplomatic and he exaggerates his importance out of all proportions, but essentially is a coward.’ He was a thirty-year-old captain of a barge from Hamburg. Together with his wife and children he lived in a house that had belonged to the Jewish doctor Mostovy.
From the start, Flemish collaborators, who often already before the war had been members of anti-Jewish organisations, joined the Sipo-SD, mostly as interpreters. At first they held administrative and supporting jobs and in the meanwhile they got acquainted with the real police work.(Van den Wijngaert: 159-167, 202-205) Most of them were truly convinced Nazi’s. The Flemish collaborators were all volunteers. They applied for the job. They wanted to be a part of this. “Greed could be important, and the desire to gain favour with the occupiers, or promotions within the unit… and, in some cases, alcoholism.” (Boxham & Kushner: 149) Their autonomy was great. It cannot be said that they had the excuse of “obeying orders”. Lauterborn for example was very zealous in hunting Jews and very creative and ingenious in finding ways to locate those Jews who were hiding. At one particular moment he asked some prison authorities to lock him up for seventeen days in the hope of getting information from his cell “mates”.
But these Sipo-SD members would never have been so “successful” in the persecution of Jews, if they had not been assisted actively by more than 1000 Nazi informers, who were eager to report Jews in hiding. “Many people throughout German-occupied Europe played an indirect role by their complicit support of the Nazi regime, the occupying German authorities, or their own collaborationist governments. By constantly surveilling their neighborhoods, informing to the Gestapo, denouncing Jews in hiding, and countless other ways, they aided and abetted the genocide”. (Jones: 232) “[T]he point I want to make is that there were indeed some people who behaved criminally by betraying their Jewish neighbours [like Gustaaf De Schutter, who betrayed Jo Polak] and thereby sentencing them to death.” (Strom & Parsons: 384) Debra writes in his report: “I estimate the number of informers at one thousand. They were not paid. We expected them to act out of political idealism.” But Gustaaf De Schutter would act out of greed. Jonas Polak, one of the Jews who were hidden by Charles Hendrickx, had entrusted De Schutter with some of his properties, but what Polak did not know was that De Schutter was also an intimate friend of Debra. He warned Debra that Polak would take him to Mrs. Bremer. Ten minutes after their arrival at Hendrickx, the Gestapo raids. Polak is beaten by Debra, but tries to defend himself with his false identity card. After the war he tells what happened: “After a moment of hesitation, Debra turns to De Schutter, who confirms that I was called Polak. Debra: ‘It is no use denying.’ Then De Schutter came down and said to me: ‘Jo, it is no use denying, it is better telling the truth.’ De Schutter knew that I had a false identity card, so he could have saved me from this very difficult situation, instead of fooling me, especially because at that moment the Gestapo hesitated. Consequently I was arrested by the Gestapo, just like Mrs. Bremer, her child and a certain Gross, all people who were hiding there. We were taken to Wilrijk prison [being the prison of the Gestapo headquarters].” There he hears from Mr. Bremer, who had the cell next to him, that she had heard that it were indeed Gustaaf De Schutter and his son-in-law Van den Heurck who had betrayed them. In the middle of questioning Mrs. Bremer, Holm asks Debra who Van den Heurck is. Debra answers: “That is the one who turned them in…” ¨Polak accuses De Schutter and Van den Heurck: “The motive for their betrayal was to get rid of us, so they could lay their hands on the jewellery and the stocks and shares.” After the war De Schutter admits that he said to Debra, that Jonas was “Polak”, and to have said: “It is better that you tell the truth, so there is no sense denying.” And De Schutter defends his behaviour: “This was said with the ‘insight’ that he [Polak] in that case would have fewer problems.”
4.3.2 Sipo-SD members present at the raids at Sluys and with the Hendrickx families
4.3.2.1 Louis Debra
Louis Debra was present at the raid in Boechout on January 31 1943, where Klaas Sluys and five Jews would be arrested, and at the raid in Edegem in the house of Charles Hendrickx on March 13 1943, were four Jews would be arrested. And together with Lauterborn, he arrested Door Hendrickx and his wife too. Klaas, Charles, Door and his wife gave evidence against Debra in court. We have their testimonies, or, as in the case of Jonas Polak, his statement and the statements of some other Gestapo members as well, who were present at one of the raids.
Klaas testified as follows: “At a certain moment [during the search of the house, and after they had already found the Jews] I saw Debra forcing a drawer, and I told him, that he didn’t had the right to do this, so he [Debra] answered me that he had the right to shoot me… Debra was wearing civil cloathes that night, dressed very normally… Debra was searching together with the Germans and I saw a weapon that was next to him… According to my wife, it was Debra who returned the key of the house [the next morning] with one or another pretext… When I was questioned by Holm later on, concerning the arrest of Hendrickx, I saw Debra again in prison. He was there [to do his job] as an interpreter, and as someone who was familiar with the situation very well. When I arrived there, [Door] Hendrickx and his wife were already present. It certainly was Debra who was there… When I had returned from Germany, I still had to go to jail [for a short period of time] and then I also saw Debra in there... [This was the moment that Debra himself was arrested by the Germans for stealing and selling alcohol, that was meant for the Wehrmacht.] I do not know what his attitude was when the Jews were found.” Debra denied that he was present at the interrogation and that this is a case of mistaken identity, but he admitted [during the house search in Boechout] having spoken to the testifier [Klaas] in a harsh way, because he was told him that he printed communist printings, and: “I am an anti-communist. I have returned the key to the wife, and I told her to go to the Reverend for help... When they [the Gestapo headquarters in Antwerp] called me, I thought I knew where Heuvelstraat [and Klaas’ house] was… I behaved in a rude and brutal way. I don’t think I was carrying a weapon. At a certain moment Pitz placed his weapon next to me.” At his trial he first denied having taken part in the raid, and then he changed his mind and admits that perhaps he might have helped a little with the house search. The reporter of the newspaper, De Volksgazet, wrote that at that moment everyone in the courtroom audience started laughing.
Door Hendrickx testified as follows: “We were deported, ill-treated and interrogated by Debra, who led the inquiry and who wanted to know where the Jews were hidden… I was questioned by Debra and Holm three times. They knew everything, even the number of Jews, so it was impossible to deny. Sluys was questioned with me only once. It was Debra who asked where the Jews were… At each of the three interrogations, Debra was present… At the questioning in prison – the subject was always the same – I was beaten by Debra and by Holm. One blow even broke my set of dentures.”
Charles Hendrickx declared: “On March 17 [correction: March 13] 1942 Debra came in accompanied by a German in civilian clothes. Debra was armed with a revolver… It was Debra who was in charge… He asked me if Polak was there. When I tried to mislead him by saying that Polak was perhaps next door, he pulled out his revolver. I was put with my head against the kitchen wall; the German stayed downstairs and Debra went upstairs. I could get out and went into hdiding. For three days Debra and Lauterborn came looking at our house, and they even went to look after me at my place of work, Bell Thelephone… It was Debra who gave the orders. It was he who gave the order to take the child [Sophia Bremer] with them... When I was taken to Antwerp and Lauterborn said that there still were other Jews hidden in Edegem, I was beaten by Debra… I was confronted with Gross, Bremer and Polak at Holms’ office the day after. Debra was present, together with two (other) members of the Gestapo… Debra played the interpreter. I was beaten by Holm, not by Debra… During the interrogation, Holm beat me using a riding-whip.
Philomena Coene declared as follows: “Debra said that it seemed to be that there were Jews in the house. Lauterborn went upstairs… Debra, who claims that he never carried a weapon, struck a person who was present in the face with his revolver.”… Two or three days later Debra came in alone; at that moment my husband was away. Debra said to me: ‘Prepare yourself because you will have to come with me.’ Then Lauterborn came in together with my husband. Debra himself took clothes out of the closet and threw them on the bed. Between the clothes, there was a bracelet of my daughter. And Debra claimed that this was something that had belonged to the Jews. When I denied that, he hit me so hard, I thought I had no head anymore, and he said: ‘This is only the beginning.’… It was Debra who did the house search and it was he who ill-treated me badly by hitting me in my face… I was questioned only once, and then I was hit no more. At the interrogation only Holm, Debra and a young woman, who was the stenographer, were present. Debra played the leading part. They asked me how long there had been Jews in our house… I also saw my husband and Mr. Sluys.
Debra said that he was forced to assist the SD in this raid, because he himself got into trouble by helping a couple of Jews. This could have been true, if he would have remained in the background instead of taking the lead. But he did.
Who was this man? He was born in Vlissingen in the Netherlands on September 5 1906. He lived with his parents in the Nieuwelei 34 in Mortsel. The neighbours noticed that in May 1940 he already was visited by German officers. In June 1940 he presented himself at the Feldkommandatur, applying for a job as interpreter. He received a certificate for this work, saying: “Herr Louis Joseph Debra, ge.[boren] 5. Sept. 1906 in Vlissingen, Holland, war in der Zeit vom 1 Juni 1940 bis ende Juli 1940 dem Kraftfahroffizier der Feldkommandatur von der Stadtverwaltung Antwerpen als Dolmetscher zur Verfügung gestellt gewesen. Neben den Aufgaben als Dolmetscher hat sich Herrr Debra noch mit einer Reihe von buchhalterischen Arbeiten in Zusammenhang mit der Zulassung von Zivilkraftfahrzeugen zum öffentlichen Verkehr beschäftigt. Herr Debra hat sich als ein zuverlässiger und stets fleissiger Mitarbeiter erwiesen. Er kann auf dem Gebiete des Kraftfahrwesens und den oben erwähnten Aufgaben durchaus empfohlen werden.” Through his German connections, he finds a job at the Frontreperaturbetrieb ERLA VII, the factory in Mortsel where German planes were repaired. In half a year Debra becomes acquainted with, and learns how to deal with different leaders of the GPF (Geheime Feldpolizei), the Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei) and the Black Brigade [a militia of collaborators]. This resulted in a close cooperation between those leaders and Debra. At the end of 1940 he also got acquainted with members of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). He meets them in the riding school. Debra started as “Ehrenamtliche Angestellter” or non-paid collaborator of the Sipo-SD of Antwerp, although he regularly got fuel from the Sipo to drive his car. Debra was fond of cars. He is a Dolmetscher (translator/interpreter). Dr. Werner and Desselman will become his intimate friends, who are invited to his place, and with whom he goes riding and hunting.
According to his colleague Thonon, Debra certainly until 1944 “was an agent who had free access to the Dienststelle, joined several “Aktione” and took part – with his car – in arrests.” All his colleagues confirmed that he had free access to all the offices and that he enjoyed the fullest confidence.
Debra had built up an extended informal network of contacts in a very short time. He had contacts with the GFP, the Sipo, the [collaborating] Black Gendarmerie, the Devizenschutzkommando, the Kommandatur and with the Abwehrstelle or the German espionage. He furthermore is acquainted with collaborating New Order-movements. He was a member of the DeVlag, the VNV, the General SS and of the National Socialist Movement in Flanders. And before the war he was already a very active member of the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic organisation Volksverweering. He brought in a lot of subscribers for their magazine and he attended the meetings of the organisation. It was in this organisation that he most likely got acquainted with Lauterborn. In a report of such a meeting in “De Gulden Kroon” Lijnwaadmarkt 11 in Antwerp in April 1941, Debra stands up and “demanda une action et un nettoyage plus énergique... Il remit ensuite avec beaucoup d'ostentation, au président de la séance un billet de Frs. 500, afin, disait-il d'acheter des marteaux avec très longs manches pour casser les carreaux des magasins juifs, comme cela se faisait en Allemagne.” His ex-fiancée, Louise Henrot, who was engaged, although not officially, to Debra between 1938 and 1942, confirms that h was against Jews in an exaggerated way, already before the war. In February 1946 the police found a box containing documents concerning the activities of the “Verwalter von Feindvermögen und Judenvermögen”. One of the documents was a curriculum vitae of Debra dated July 15th 1940, in which he writes: “Always having been German-minded, I was a loyal subscriber of Welt-dienst, “Service Mondial” from Erthfurth, Volksverweering and Ami du Peuple, De Aanval etc. all anti-Jewish movements of which I was an active member.”
In a report on the “General Situation” he reproached the Militärverwaltung its laxity, because there is not one Jew who was wearing the Star of David yet, despite the fact that the decree already had been issued. He proposed to burn the Star of David on their foreheads with a branding iron. At his trial he said that the people themselves wanted the Jews to be branded. After the war, his nephew, Doctor N. Henneaux, declared that Debra in April 1941 had in his suitcase a revolver and a stick. Debra explained to him why: “pour mettre les juifs à la raison. Il se vantait d’avoir encore rossé d’importance des Juifs quelque temps auparavant.”
“What we understand to be an anti-Semite is someone who had made out of his/her hatred of the Jews an important ‘drive for his existence’ and who would devote his/her heart and soul in his/her cooperation with the persecution of the Jews. In other words, we are speaking here about the hard, active core that was prepared to move from verbal violence into physical violence… Usually anti-Semites were endless troublemakers and discontented people who during their entire lives messed things up, but who always blamed others for it… The exclusive, New-Order-minded nationalism of the thirties – especially the Flemish one with the stress on descent – provided the legitimization for the distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ they were looking for. ‘They do not belong here. We do.’ ‘Jews out!’” (Saerens: 2000: 742-744)
Debra’s virulent anti-Semitism however would not prevent him from time to time to help Jews he knew, and who could afford to pay him for his “services”. Thus for example he wrote a memorandum for Mr. Pels, who was a Jew, saying: “The undersigned L.J. Debra, active member of the anti-Jewish assembly Volksverweering and SS-member, declares solemnly to have checked if you and your children are Jewish or not. According to the decree of October 28 1940 of the Militarbefehlhaber of Belgium and Northern-France you should not be considered as being Jewish.” Pels said that he paid 10,000 Bfr. (currently € 6,250) for this declaration. He did the same for Beherman, but he got into trouble with Holm because he had falsified the signature of Dr. Werner and because he had used the stamp of the SD to prevent Beherman from being arrested for non registration in the Jewish register and for the use of false papers. Beherman’s wife declaired after the war: “Un certain Dr. Lambert Edmond, chef des registres des juifs à Anvers avait fait des faux papiers à mon mari, un juif russe, pour ne pas le faire inscrire au registre des juifs. Afin d’éviter toute éventualité Mr. Debra voulait le faire adopter par mon oncle, et touchait pour le faire une somme d’environ 15,000 francs. (currently € 9,375) At the end of October 1942 he also warned the Jewish baker, Joseph Bakker, that is was time to flee because he was going to be arrested. But he knew this baker well, because he had been one of his clients for many years.
When the raids started to round up Jews, the Dolmetscher got involved in an early phase. They accompanied the Antwerp Jew hunters, like Felix Lauterborn, during their actions, to give these actions an official character. (Saerens, 2005: 299) Together with his friends of the Sicherheitspolizei, Debra participated in several raids or “Aktionen”. Is it still surprising that after the war they found in Debra’s house several Jewish objects, like Jewish religious books, records with Hebrew songs, a scale for diamonds and prayer rolls? Debra thought that he could explain this: “I was always interested in the Jewish religion and I had even several Jewish prayer rolls at home myself, and books to study Hebrew as well. The prayer rolls came out of Holm’s cellar, and I had taken them along with me as an antiquity and for their religious value, because the SD would had have burned everything anyway.” At Debra’s trial Fred Van Dommelen, who knew Debra from the pre-war period, confessed that the accused person was German-minded for 100%, and that he supposed that he did so out of greed.
“Theodor Adorno and his colleagues studied the psychology of ‘potential fascists’… The study suggested that such people often have an ‘authoritarian personality’, typified by rigidity of thought and behaviour, an emphasis on power and will rather than imagination and gentleness superstitious thinking, rigid adherence to conventional values and aggression towards those who think and/or act differently. A central point is a submissive, uncritical attitude towards authority… Rigidity, superstition, obedience, conformity, aggression and the emphasis on power and will were all striking features of many leading Nazis.” (Glover: 330) “[I]t is doubtful that we can fully test whether killers might have been of the psychologically disturbed violent type. Court-appointed psychologists carefully assessed a few defendants, usually concluding that they were sane... Yet it should be frankly admitted that we cannot penetrate far into the characters of most perpetrators, since we lack reliable psychological data.” (Mann: 212) But in the case of Debra, we found such a psychiatric report in his file, and it becomes immediately clear that he can not be seen as a person with a submissive, uncritical attitude towards authority at all times. For instance, the Court Martial convicted him on September 26 1933 for desertion from the Belgian army, and it sentenced him to 6 months imprisonment. In 1944 he is imprisoned by the Germans for theft.
“He was a child who was difficult to handle. He rarely obeyed. He liked weapons and with his pocket money he bought real weapons, which for example he used to shoot the neighbour’s cats… He was a very bad student. He tried never to take an examination, so he nearly was expelled from school… He felt that his father didn’t understand him. He was extremely hot-tempered, and then he reacted in a strange way. Once in an outburst of anger he tried to strangle one of his sisters… He got psoriasis… After a month of his military service in the Belgian army he deserted after having beaten a lieutenant. He explains his numerous job changes, because he didn’t want to commit himself, he wanted to stay free. On the other hand, he was never able to obey a superior… His family says that he is incapable of telling the truth… Other pieces of information from a doctor confirm that he took a lot of narcotic drugs for his psoriasis. On the other hand, according to one of his family members, he also had a pathological inclination to help one and all. Someone who knew him very well said that his character always had been ambitious, with a great attachment to some people and resentful to others, sometimes very kind and admissive, sometimes very hard and brutal towards people and animals… Debra disposed of normally developed psychological functions. He was not mentally ill, and not someone with a mental deficiency. Some of his statements match the truth, and demonstrate a mythomanian personality. His inventions have no utilitarian purpose, but are related to a certain disposition to megalomania: he tries to appear as an important person, and he did so his whole life long. The charitable deeds that he shows do not stem from a humanitarian nature: they emerge from his drive to be important, to appear in the eyes of others – whoever they may be – a “figure”. He never in any way showed in any way regret or remorse. He is deeply selfish, and has no social awareness whatsoever. He never expressed any moral feelings. He never showed any affective sensitivity during our examination... Debra had a hereditary defect and he showed signs of physical defects, that are normally the morphological translation of a predisposition to neuropsychological disorders.”
“It is unpopular to say so, but I think that some people are just born with aggressive, punitive characters and others are just born with caring, solicitous characters. This is part of humanity’s collective genetic make-up. To be sure, nurture counts more than nature but, all things being equal, people are different and some are kind while others are nasty… [I]t is helpful to restate even the obvious – that some people are good by character and some are evil by character.” (Blumenthal: 27, 28) “[I]ntelligent moral judgment presupposes cognitive and moral abilities.” (Blumenthal: 67) Well, I dare to say that Debra really had a big psychological, or even a psychiatric problem. His character caused him problems time and again, until he started working for the Gestapo. In that environment his deficiencies were defined as qualities.
The question is: “Can we declare such a man to be legally accountable?” “Persons may suffer from any of a variety of mental illnesses that undermine or destroy their powers of agency – the capacities they need to act as competent moral agents pursuing their goals, making rational choices, and taking responsibility for their actions…: (1) sufficient cognitive powers to understand the nature of one’s acts,… that they are right or wrong and the likely consequences of performing them… (2) sufficient powers of deliberation to make informed choices and decisions… in the light of one’s most deeply held goals and priorities, while taking into account available evidence concerning the most effective means of achieving them; and (3) sufficient powers of volition to enable one to carry out decisions and choices in action; in ordinary language these powers are often referred to as ‘self-control’… Being responsible (possessing powers of agency) gets one in the moral game, so to speak; once one is in the game and eligible, one can be held responsible (praiseworthy, blameworthy, deserving of reward, or liable to punishment, etc.) for one’s exercise of those powers. However, responsible persons are sometimes not blameworthy for particular wrong acts because they have a justified excuse… Most people with diminished responsibility can be correctly described as blameworthy for some (perhaps most) of their wrongdoing, as well as praiseworthy for their good deeds.” (Jones: 29, 101) Well, I consider Debra as a person with a diminished responsibility, but blameworthy at the same time. The tragic thing is that nowadays somebody like him would get medication followed by a certain kind of therapy. But people like him are clever enough to know when they have to behave in a very cooperative way, to mislead people so that they think he really is a reasonable human being. But he is clearly not. He kept lying during his process, and even beyond. The death sentence was asked for him. At first he was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour, but he appealed and on May 21 1950 he was sentenced to twenty years for having been an informer, for his political and police collaboration with the enemy, but also for his economic collaboration. But on the basis of the psychiatric report he wasn’t send to jail but interned in a psychiatric clinic in Tournai. In 1951 he proposed tothe psychiatric commission of the Antwerp prison to let him go free under the condition and his engagement that he would leave the country and that would never return to it anymore. The commission accepted his proposal. He was released on probation from the clinic on May 21 1951. The law nr. 21 of April 9 1930 however says that every person who is released after having been interned, should stay under supervision for at least a year. Apparently nobody had thought about this. He left for the Netherlands and – this is unbelievable, because he just promised never to return to Belgium again – he went to the Belgian Consul General in Amsterdam, who writes a letter to Paul Van Zeeland, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affaires, to ask him why this Belgian citizen is expelled from Belgium: “Il est en autre détenteur d’un certificat de civisme, de bonnes conduite, vis et moeurs, délivré à Tournai le 9 décembre 1950, ainsi que d’un même certificat délivré à Mortsel le 25 septembre 1950. Le nommé Debra, qui est donc belge d’après les documents produits, a reçu après un internement subi à Anvers le certificat dont veuillez trouver une photocopie ci-jointe. Puis-je vous demander s’il existe une raison majeure pour expulser un belge de Belgique? Le nommé Debra ayant des craintes de rentrer en Belgique sollicite la délivrance d’un sauf-conduit.” In August 1951 he got a temporary permit of seven days, because “he wanted to leave for Germany, but there, according to his wife, he was unable to adapt himself, so now he would leave for France.” Debra asked the Catholic Flemish senator Jozef A. Jespers to write a letter on his behalf to ask if he can’t stay in Belgium, and his wife, S.E. Dewost, – he appears to be married – even wrote a letter to the king to ask if it is not possible to stay in Belgium. Apparently his request was rejected, because on December 12 1951 he turned up in Marseille where he went to see the Belgian consul, who also writes a letter: “L’intéressé s’est presenté le 10 crt., en demandant mon intervention auprès des Services préfectoraux des Bdr à Marseille pour l’aider à obtenir un permis de séjour, il m’a part de son désir de se fixer en France, et m’a appris qu’il avait été condamné le 21/5/1950 par le Tribunal Militaire à Bruxelles pour collaboration économique.” All these facts prove that Debra must have been a real expert in misleading people and convincing them about his good intentions.
4.3.2.2 Emiel Wyndaele
Klaas testified at Debra’s trial as follows: “Those who searched the house, called each other by their name, and so I heard that Wyndaele and Schuermans were there.” Emiel Wyndaele was a painter and paperhanger who was born in 1916 in Diest. When the war broke out, he was a soldier in the Belgian army. On May 24 1940 he became a prisoner of war. He returned from Germany on August 28 1940. He had no work, until in June 1941 he applied to the leader of the Black Brigade, Raymond Tollenaere, for a job. Since 1936 Wyndaele, who was a catholic and an anti-communist, had been a member of the VNV and by the end of 1940 he had joined the Black Brigade too. Tollenaere advised him to follow a course for SS-Scharführer in Germany. He followed this course from July 15 1941 until September 1941, after which he applied for a job at the SD in Antwerp. He led the Ermittelungsdienst, that was founded by the Flemish Max Gunther. In 1943 he goes working for the Dienst van Toezicht or Supervision Service that controlled the registers of population, and that searched for information in those registers. Part of their job was the identification of people. He had his office at the SD, but he also had a task at the Office for Foreigners in Antwerp. He supervised the personnel there and controlled the documents that were going out, to prevent delivery of false identity papers to Jews. This writing desk perpetrator admitted in 1948 that he brought lists with foreigners to the SD. Being a Hilfspolizeibeamte, he took part in several arrests of Jews at the end of 1942 and also at the beginning of 1943. He left the SD in the beginning of 1943 for a job at the police office of the Minister of Internal Affaires. He was the man who gave the order to send a spy to the Reformed Church in the Sanderusstraat, Antwerp, to keep an eye on the anti-German reverend Winter and his parish. One of his superiors wrote about him on July 8 1944 the following: “He is very clever in collecting information.” He was arrested on July 12 1945. On November 9 1949 he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but thanks to a collective pardon he was released immediately. After his release he married Maria Thielens and they got two children, who were born in 1951 and in 1953. In 1953 he aplied for his civil rights to be restored in order to be able to make bids for public works for painters. Restoration took place, in 1962.
4.3.2.3 Jan Schuermans
Schuermans accompanied Kaeding and Debra when they drove to Boechout to arrest Klaas Sluys. Because Kaeding’s interpreter was ill at that moment, Schuermans would replace him during the interrogation of Klaas. “That day he was about 22 years old, wore the uniform of the SD and was armed with a revolver,” according a testimony by Klaas.
Jan Schuermans was born in 1923 in Lier. He too had been unemployed in 1940 and during the first half of 1941. In June 1941 he got a job as a clerk accountant with Daimler Benz. He said that he met Pitz in May or June 1942, and that Pitz proposed that he become a member of the SD, and to work as an interpreter. He applied in writing a letter, and on July 1 1942 he took up office at the SD, where he had to work with Criminal Ober Assistent Ohmstedt. It was Ohmstedt himself who went to the Daimler-Benz factory to try to persuade Schuermans to come and work for the SD. Daimler-Benz did not want to let hem go, so the SD had to summon the firm. He was an assistant in Abteilung IV D 2 (Widerstand, Geiseln, Sühneleistungen, Ausweisungen, Abschiebungen, Schutzdienst). After the war the Court was convinced that Schuermans had taken up service at the SD as Hilfspolizei and as Dolmetscher, and in the SS as Staffelmann an later on as Sturmmann, out of his own free will.
One of the doorkeepers of the SD in Antwerp testifies against Schuermans: “I can declare that he was guilty of ill-treatments during interrogations, of beating with his fist or with the stick for example. He shot two Jews on the way to Malines, when he transported them to the Sammellager Dossin, and he boasted about his deed.” Schuermans took part in quite a lot of arrests of Jews. Schuermans also awaited a member of the resistance, a certain Murell, upon his arrival, he shot him.
In 1944 he married Petronella Peeters.
Towards the end of the war, he sensed that Germany was going to lose the war, and consequently he started informing the resistance out of self-interest. When this was about to be revealed, he decided to flee and to hide in Gent. He stayed there until the moment of the liberation. At his trial the Court takes into account that Schuermans still was a young man. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment and hard labour. Their motivation: “The attitude of Schuermans at the SD is not the attitude of a person who was looking how he could rend services to resistance movements, but the attitude of a passionate en truly convinced follower of the Nazi-regime, who didn’t spare any effort to force confessions from arrested people in order to to track down other members of the resistance.”
4.3.2.4 Conrad Kaeding
In one of the statements by Debra about the raid at Klaas’ place, we can read: “I think I was with Kaeding and Van Sintjan got into our car, because the German asked him to point out Sluys’ factory.” Kaeding was present at this raid. We know this for sure because he is also mentioned in Klaas’ sentence. “In der Hauptverhandlung ist durch die Vernehmung des Angeklagten und die Verlesung der Aussagen von Alexander, Paula, Annie und Maria Gross vom 1.2.1943 – Bl. 3 und 4 d.A. - sowie durch die uneidliche Vernehmung des zeugen Krim.Ass. Käeding folgender Sachverhalt festgestellt worden...“ This means that Kaeding witnessed the raid. And Schuermans too stated: “It was Kaeding who had the lead in this case and who had got information from I don’t know who that Sluys Klaas was listening to the English broadcasting and that he edited pamphlets.” Together with Debra I accompanied Kaeding to go and arrest this person.” SS-Scharführer Conrad Kaeding worked for the Gestapo as Kriminal-Assistant already before the war. During the war he worked at the SD in Antwerp and was responsible for Abteilung IV E to fight the White Brigade (or the largest group of the Resistance). He was thirty years old. Debra wrote in his report about Kaeding: “A debauched sloshed pig. He wasn’t faithful to one woman, and working at the SD he gathered a fortune by stealing. He smuggled pigs that had been slaughtered clandestinely, from France, in a car that had been sealed by the Gestapo, and then he sold the meat at the SD. This came out and the Hauptdienststelle in Brussels was planning to prosecute him for it. Rumours say that he would have been arrested in Germany by Germans themselves or/and that he was killed at the end of the war.
4.3.2.5 Jan Pitz
Debra declared: “At a certain moment Pitz put his weapon next to me.” This is how we know that Pitz was present at the raid at Klaas’place.
Johan Pitz was born in Raeren in 1905. Raeren was a part of Germany that after World War I was transferred to Belgium. He married a Belgian woman in 1930 and came to Belgium about around the same year. He ran a bathhouse in Lier. When the war broke out, he became suspect because he was called “the German”, although he had the Belgian nationality and although he had fulfilled his military service.
He probably took up office at the SD at the end of 1940, nearly thirty-five years of age. He was an SS-Staffelmann at the Sipo and an interpreter as well, because by then he spoke the Flemish language fluently. Pitz and his colleague von Hören, were responsible for Abteilung IV A (Kommunismus, Marxismus, Feindpropaganda). He was very brutal towards the people he interrogated. He was often drunk, also while performing service.” This was confirmed by Jan Schuermans and Suzanne Lehardy, one of the female typists: “Pitz, half German, he really was predisposed to behave in a bestial way.”
In 1942 he became an interpreter at the Abteilung IV A, responsible for the fight against communist agitation. At the end of 1943 he got a Nachtschein, that made it possible for him to arrest people all by himself. One can say that almost every Dollmetscher easily started beating and ill-treatment. The Dolmetscher were always armed, also in the SD itself.” Together with von Hören, Pitz was involved in dirty deals outside the service that provided them with money, but they were also involved in the murder of a woman. In September 1943 he started a firm, in which Debra got a leading role, and for this economic collaboration he was sentenced too. Pitz paid Debra about 10,000 Bfr. (currently € 6,250) per month for it, but the business turned out to be not so successful, and so Pitz confessed that he didn’t make any profit out of it. Pitz wasn’t too much interested in politics and ideology. He was an opportunist, keeping up appearances and always looking out for his self-interest.
4.3.2.6 Felix Lauterborn
Philomena Coene declared: “When Debra came in, I was in the shop with a client. Debra locked the door and then I saw Lauterborn with the revolver in his hand…
Felix Lauterborn was a photographer-reporter up to 1930. He was born in Antwerp in 1895. In 1935 he became a member of the extreme anti-Semitic movement, called Volksverweering. The truly convinced national-socialists in Antwerp were relatively strong. Already before the war, a lot of them were members of anti-Jewish organisations. These were fanatics who were acquainted with the Antwerp Jewish Community. Definitely this acquaintance made is easier to hunt down the Jews. These groups, like Volksverweering, were relatively small, but because of their accumulative aggressive performances, they created an atmosphere of resignation. The number of bystanders increased. When the war broke out he went on the run and after the capitulation he returned to Antwerp, but without work. In August 1941 he started to work without pay in the shop of the Volksverweering in the Wiegstraat. He also checked whether the announcements of the different decrees were properly affixed. The Germans asked Volksverweering for qualified personnel for the SD.
Schuermans wrote about him: “The arrests of Jews that he performed are countless. He was the right-hand of Kriminal-oberassistent Erich Holm. Although he was an agent, he arrested Jews and performed house searchings on his own initiative. The fortune of the Jews (gold, precious stones and jewels) that Lauterborn handed over to the Germans amounts to millions. For that he was rewarded handsomely by the Devizenschutzkommando. He not only informed the Germans about Jews, but also about other people. I dare to declare in full conscience, that Lauterborn is the person who has worked most people into the grip of the Gestapo.” The Public Prosecutor agreed: “Even more than the executioners of Breendonk, who committed their cruelties inside the walls of the camps, he [Lauterborn] is known as the most violent, the most merciless and the cruelest of those who collaborated with the enemy.”
Debra wrote about Lauterborn: “He – being busy stealing from deserted houses – was caught by the GFP [Geheime Feldpolizei] a several times, but regularly he got away with it thanks to intervention by Holm.” But Maria Dierckx, the neighbour of Door Hendrickx, noticed that not just Lauterborn returned [to Hendrickx’ home] after his arrest, but Debra as well.
The Public Prosecutor asked for the death penalty for Lauterborn, but he was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour instead. After the war he was practically the only one who continued to be anti-Jewish and ant-Semitic, and this in a very cynical way. The reason that the Jews had been prosecuted was, according to Lauterborn, their own behaviour. For him the Jews were still not trustworthy. He died in the Louvain prison on November 2 1956, probably as the result of a heart attack. (Saerens, 2005: 47)
4.3.3 The collaborator: Staf Van Sintjan
Staf Van Sintjan was the wartime mayor of Boechout from 1941 until 1944. On January 31 1943 he was present at the raid at Klaas Sluys’. Why? According to Debra and Schuermans it would have been Kaeding who asked Van Sintjan to point out the Sluys’ factory, because they couldn’t find his house nor his factory. Klaas tells us: “During the house search I asked the mayor: ‘Is this thanks to you?’ but he denied. After the war, Klaas testified clearly in favour of Staf Van Sintjan: “[A]round midnight about eight members of the Gestapo came to see the printing establishment. Four or five of them accompanied me to the factory, while the other three searched the villa. There they found the Jews. The mayor had to accompany them… According to his own statement he had been summoned [by Kaeding]. He followed what was going on, but did not play an active role. He protected my interests… The Jews were found in our house by accident… One child was saved because we acted as if it was our own. The mayor, who could have known the truth, said nothing.”
The research revealed an overload of tragic events in which the leading elite showed a sad smarting shortage of democratic assertiveness. This democratic debacle was rooted in political ideologies going back into the prewar period. A research about the attitude of the Belgian government in the Jewish tragedy gives an insight into the soul of the Belgian establishment in the crucial years from 1930 until 1950. Without a doubt, it was a period in which the liberal democracy system itself of was questioned by a majority of the societal elite. The relation between this fundamental fact and the opinion towards the migration of Jewish people, especially during the period of the radical racial persecution of the foreign occupier is obvious. During the occupation the policy of the lesser evil derailed. The trains to Auschwitz didn’t.
Already before the war, Staf Van Sintjan was a member of the VNV (Vlaams Nationaal Verbond or the Flemish National Alliance), an extreme rightist, anti-democratic, anti-Belgian and Flemish-nationalistic, political party which in the 1939 elections got 15% of the votes in Flandres which corresponds to 200.000 voters. The VNV had 30,000 members. Inside the VNV anti-Semitism had become generally accepted. (De Wever: 39-49) But the VNV was not the only party which was anti-Semitic. During the campaign for the municipal elections in Antwerp in 1938, anti-Semitism appeared to be widespread. The Jewish presence was a central item in the election struggle. This was the case for the VNV and other extreme rightist parties like Rex and Verdinaso, but even for the Catholic Party. Staf Van Sintjan who was strongly Catholic, called himself a fervent national-socialist, who took action against smugglers, profiteers, (supposed) members of the resistance and persons who refused to go to work in Germany. From time to time he stuck his neck out to help other people. In the context of this paper it is interesting to know that Jacob Rodriquez, a Jew, asked to be heard as first witness at the trial of Staf Van Sintjan, because he survived the war thanks to Van Sintjan.Van Sintjan had helped Rodriguez several times, by giving him support, work and by misleading four times the Gestapo on Rodriguez’ behalf. And this Jew had no money to pay Van Sintjan for his services. He did it just out of humanitarian feelings. Was Van Sintjan then a helper? For Rodriguez certainly. “How many… Belgian... mayors, local bureaucrats, police chiefs, and others, even if they were personally opposed to Germany, rebelled against the Germans or openly contravened their orders – even though disobedience did not always bring direct deadly danger?” (Bauer: 79) Well, Van Sint Jan did this on several occasions but – as far as we know – for only one person.
It was the VNV that got the collaboration going. The occupier found in the VNV a suitable partner to maintain law and order, if the party leaders were prepared to recognize that all power was under the control of Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich. The government under the occupation forced the VNV to breake in into the Belgian power structures, and this at all levels. In 1943 for example one out of two Flemish municipalities was governed by a VNV-mayor. Staf Van Sintjan is one of them. On Juni 11 1947 Van Sintjan was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, but released earlier. In 1963 he was rehabilitated. He died in Boechout on December 1 1992.
4.3.4 Conclusion
“People who do something wrong are blameworthy only if they ‘could have done otherwise,’ that is, if they had the personal ability and the opportunity to act differently than they in fact did.” (Jones: 72) “[M]ost perpetrators had mixed motives, combining several of them, and they changed with time. Thus we must place perpetrators amid changing historical and social contexts and amid their own life careers.” (Mann: 189) “[T]he perpetrators of this evil were neither monsters nor beasts but ordinary people, rather like us. Today, our response to this evil must take both of those facts into account. First of all, we must not abandon the principles of justice: the guilty must be judged, each according to his precise acts and responsibilities… Secondly, we must refuse to establish a radical discontinuity between “them” and “us”, to demonize the guilty, and to look upon individuals or groups as perfectly coherent and homogeneous.” (Todorov: 229) We must avoid seeing things as black and white; because there is a vast zone of grey. We must avoid seeing groups as uniform and homogeneous.
What attracted them? The fact that belonging to the powerful and feared Sipo-SD made them feel superior not only to Jews but also to other people. For those who had been outcasts before the war, this was their window of opportunity to prove themselves and to be respected by those in power or feared by those who were not in power. This feeling of superiority worked like a drug. They thought they could get away with anything: stealing, torturing… Power and control, that’s what it was all about. But “without a guiding ideological motivation and justification, mass murder generally, and the intent to annihilate the Jewish people in particular, would have been unthinkable. Ideology is central… With the Holocaust, pragmatic considerations were marginal. Yes, a tremendous effort was exerted to rob the Jews of their property or to take it after they were murdered. But no serious historian has ever claimed that robbery was the basic reason for the murder. Robbery was the outcome of the Holocaust, not its cause. No, the basic motivation was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, non-pragmatic, ideology – which then was executed by very rational, pragmatic means. Just as Christian anti-Semitism was based on theological speculations that fulfilled important practical functions, so Nazi anti-Semitism, which originated in the same Christian delusions but which abandoned the moral principles of Christianity along with its religious belief, translated its murderous abstractions into gradually developing policies of segregation, starvation, humiliation, and, finally, planned total murder.” (Bauer: 44, 47-48)
“The importance of role in the doing of evil is… strongly supported by the work of Ervin Staub… : ‘Originally this [violence] may have been justified as part of the war against subversion, but once violence becomes normal practice additional, totally self-serving motives for it can come into play, including greed, sex, or sadism… ideological and identity-related motives became integrated with other personal motives (e.g., power, stimulus-seeking, sadism). People function better when their different motives join and support each other, especially if they have to overcome personal inhibitions or social prohibitions.’” (Blumenthal: 51) “Staub concludes that one learns by doing and that the more one participates in evil, the harder it is to break away from the pattern of doing evil, behaviourally and mentally. This leads Staub to conclude that there is a ‘continuum of destruction’ which begins with minor acts and escalates, incrementally, to more serious ones...” (Blumenthal: 46) Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Milgram’s experiments confirm the incremental nature of the praxis of evil. It seems to me, too, that while factors such as insertion into a hierarchy, role identification, rationalization, bystander passivity, deindividuation of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and lack of resistance facilitate the incremental praxis of evil, the ability of perpetrators to ‘get away with it’,’ that is, to practice evil without punishment, allows perpetrators to conclude that they can loosen their inhibitions and pursue their roles and/or their evil impulses with impunity. ‘Getting away with it’ allows a new increment in the praxis of evil.” (Blumenthal: 78)
Conclusions
There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for Mankind.
Hannah Senesh
Working on this project has changed my life and the life of many others too, especially that of Sylvie Reichman Lednicer, to whom I could give back a great deal of her family history and could bring her back into contact with the families that hid her. Sylvie wrote me in an e-mail dated December 16th 2005: “Oliver [Lednicer, Sylvie’s husband] went to WashingtonDC, to the Holocaust Museum, and told the director of the Shoa Foundation my whole story, including of course the result of your tracing of me through their organization Hew was very excited and wants a copy of my speech and all the photos of the past as well as the reunions, which Oliver promised he would send. He was particularly interested in you and your part in this whole story. He told Oliver that he wanted to put all the information on their website, and possibly mount an exhibit at the museum of this whole wonderful story. When I get my strength back and send him photos and the speech, I will let you know what he intends to do. It’s fantastic how my life has changed since you came into it!”
I located seventeen Protestants of the Reformed Church who with certainty hid Jews: Klaas Sluys and Julia Schuyten; Henri Schuyten and Margriet Oudheusden; René Schuyten and Nelly Opstelten; John Polderman and Lea; Charles Hendrickx and Yvonne Noë; Door Hendrickx and Philomena Coenen; Jeanne Schuyten; their Reverend Herman Jan Winter and Hendrika Van der Burg; and Henri Rooze and Truus Van Buuren. There probably were more of them. All together they hid – for a shorter or a longer period – at least 29 Jews! Seven of these were caught, deported and never returned: Myriam Reichman Grosz with her three children, Paula Grosz, Alexander Grosz en Annie Grosz; Hersz Nadel; Karin Bremer with her little daughter Sophia Bremer. They also arrested Jonas Polak, but he survived Auschwitz. But twenty-one Jews – including Igo Gross, who was imprisoned for a short time, jumped of the train to Auschwitz and joined again his wife in hiding – were still alive at the moment of the liberation, thanks to these Protestant helpers and rescuers (as well as to the help of the Jewish dentist Otto Hutterer): Edith Hönig; Sigmund Hönig and Rosa Gross; Igo Gross and Rosalie Berlstein; Chana Hönig Kron; Lily Hönig and Gottfried Finkel; Markus Finkel and Laura Einig; Selma Finkel and Heinz Schindler, Sylvie Reichman and her grandmother Dobe Thaler Grunspan, Josephine or “Jopie” van Engel, Sofie Vlessing, Mr. and Mrs. Wesley, Leo, Adèle and their uncle. And then we didn’t even count the “Jewish teenaged boys” who, according to granddaughter Ann Williams-Lyzenga, were hidden for a while by Henri Schuyten and his wife Margriet, and who remained anonymous.
I was glad when I located Jacob Huisman, widower of Josephine van Engel, whom I could bring into contact with the children of Henri Rooze and Truus Van Buuren, who hid and saved his future wife. And I located Hanna Gnazic in Israel, the widow of the only surviving son of Hersz Nadel, who, after hearing me on the telephone telling the tragic story of her father-in-law, told me that knowing now that there were people who really tried to save him, makes all the difference.
This project widened and deepened my view of the world. My device is a statement of the American moral theologian, Richard McCormick, who once said: “To teach is to open someone’s eyes, to let him see what he didn’t see before.” The rescuers and Jews I’ve studied opened my eyes and let me see what true generosity, dependability, responsibility, self-reliance, connectedness, commitment and heroic moral courage mean. “It was a clear-eyed view that saw what most others did not… They were simply ordinary people doing what they felt had to be done at that time.” (Fogelman, 1994: 41, xvii) But just because of this, they became my teachers. As a teacher myself, I fully agree with Samuel and Pearl Oliner when they write:
Schools need to become caring institutions – institutions in which students, teachers, bus drivers, principals, and all others receive positive affirmation for kindness, empathy, and concern. Participants need opportunities to work and have fun together, develop intimacies, and share successes and pain; Students also need opportunities to consider broad universal principles that relate to justice and care in matters of public concern. Discussions should focus on the logic and values, implications and consequences of public actions, as well as the philosophical heritage that underlies these principles. In short, caring schools will acknowledge diversity on the road to moral concern. They will invoke emotion and intellect in the service of responsibility and caring.
In such settings, young people may come to appreciate, in ways that go beyond words alone, that rootedness in family and local community can be a means toward attachment to a more inclusive group. Citizenship education that focuses on political and legal rights is an important step in developing the sense of a larger community, but it is not a sufficient one, for such bonds are more susceptible to dissolution than those that bind people together in a shared sense of humanity. More than token gestures are required to achieve the latter. What is required is nothing less than institutionalized structures that promote supportive relationships with the same seriousness as is currently devoted to academic achievement. Above all, rescuers inform us of this important truth.” (Oliner & Oliner, 1988: 258-259)
And Eva Fogelman added to it: “I would argue that simply teaching tolerance and compassion is not enough. Values cannot exist in a vacuum. Without ways to get people involved and put those values to practical use, altruistic impulses dissipate into good intentions. Government, religious and social institutions need to create programs in which people can channel their altruistic energies.” (Fogelman, 1994: 322) And Yehuda Bauer wrote: The Holocaust is a warning. It adds three commandments to the ten of the Jewish-Christian tradition: Thou shalt not be a perpetrator; Thou shalt not be a passive victim; and Thou most certainly shalt not be a bystander. We do not know whether we will succeed in spreading this knowledge. But if there is even one chance in a million that sense should prevail, we have a moral obligation, in the spirit of Kantian moral philosophy, to try.” (Bauer, 2001: 67)
“[T]here can come a time in the life of a society, as in that of the individual, when ordinary virtue is not enough. In such moments of anguish and despair, a different virtue is needed. The subject must then not only take upon himself the action he prescribes, but accept the risks such action entails both for himself and for those close to him. And he must be willing to do so even when the individual is a stranger to him. In short, the heroic virtues, courage and generosity, become as necessary as the ordinary ones. Yet tragically – and this is the final lesson of the camps – the just, those righteous men and women who combine these qualities, are few in number.” (Todorov, 1991: 295)
I am so grateful for the support, love and friendship I received from so many people all over the world. It made it all worthwhile. I hope in the future to be able to continue doing historical research and, in doing so, locating and reuniting (descendants of) rescuers and victims to honour the moral courage of both groups and show the world that the bond between them is a message of hope for the world. They are much-needed models of moral behaviour. As Eva Fogelman puts it: “It is through public memorials that a nation conveys to its citizens the character and values it most cherishes… The stories of rescuers saving Jews are not only about evil against good; they illustrate the complexities inherent in making moral decisions. These stories involve real concerns: dealing with conflicting responsibilities, coping with peer pressures, handling social ostracism, and making choices and living with the consequences of them. Memorials ensure that the stories of rescuers will be told from one generation to the next. Without a concerted effort, the stories of these Righteous Among the Nations of the World will be lost. (Fogelman, 1994: 299, 305) Therefore, honouring the “Righteous Among the Nations of the World”, like Klaas and Julia Sluys-Schuyten; and Henri and Truus Rooze-van Buuren, “high-minded Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews”, contains a message for the future generations: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
Jan Maes
When Myriam Grosz-Reichman was arrested, the prayer shawl of her husband, Zoltan Grosz, stayed behind. Dora, the daughter of Julia Schuyten gave it to me. It represents a valued memento vivere!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. WRITTEN SOURCES AND WORKS
1. BOOKS
BAUER, Y., Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven – London, Yale University Press, 2001.
BERLER, W., Itinéraire dans les ténèbres. Monowitz, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Parijs, L’Harmattan, 1999.
BLOXHAM, D. & KUSHNER, T., The Holocaust. Critical Historical Approaches, Manchester – New York, Manchester University Press, 2005.
BLUMENTHAL, D.R., The Banality of Good and Evil. Moral Lessons from the Shoah & Jewish Tradition. Foreword by J.W. FOWLER, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1999.
BRACHFELD, S., “Ze hebben het overleefd”, Brussel, VUBPRESS, 1997.
BROWNING, C.R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York, Harper Collins, 1991.
DE VOLDER, J. & WOUTERS, L., Van binnen weent mijn hart. De vervolging van de Antwerpse joden. Geschiedenis en herinnering, Antwerpen, Standaard, 1999.
DE WEVER, B., Greep naar de macht: Vlaams nationalisme en Nieuwe Orde, het VNV, 1933-1945, Tielt, Lannoo, 1994.
FOGELMAN, E., Conscience & Courage. Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, New York-London-Toronto-Sydney-Auckland, Anchor Books Doubleday, 1994.
FRIEDLÄNDER, S., Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, New York, Harper Collins, 1997.
GLOVER, J., Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London, Pimlico, 1999 (repr. 2001).
HILBERG, R., Daders slachtoffers omstanders. De joodse catastrofe 1933-1945. Translated by P. VAN DER KAAIJ, Haarlem, Uitgeverij J.H. Gottmer – H.J.W. Becht, 1992.
HILBERG, R., Perpetrators. Victims. Bystanders. The Jewish catastrophe 1933-1945, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.
JONES, D., Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust. A study in the Ethics of Character, Lanham – Bulder – New York – Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.
KLARSFELD, S. & STEINBERG, M., Memoriaal van de deportatie der joden uit België. With a foreword by M. PIORO, Brussel – New York, Vereniging der Joodse Weggevoerden in België – Kinderen van de Deportatie, 1982 (repr. 1994).
LAUREYS, E., Meesters van het diamant. De Belgische diamantsector tijdens het nazibewind, Tielt, Lannoo, 2005.
MAERTEN, F., SELLESLAGH, F. & VAN DEN WIJNGAERT, M. (ed .), Entre la peste et le choléra. Vie et attitudes des catholiques sous l’occupation, Brussel – Louvain-la-Neuve, CEGES – Quorum – ARCA, 1999.
MANN, M., The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethic Cleansing, Cambridge – New York – Melbourne – Madrid – Cape Town – Singapore – São Paulo, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
OLINER, S. & OLINER, P., De altruïstische persoonlijkheid. Waarom riskeerden gewone mannen en vrouwen hun leven om anderen te redden, Amsterdam, Balans, 1989.
OLINER, S. & OLINER, P., The Altruistic Personality. Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. What Led Ordinary Men and Woman to Risk Their Lives on Behalf of Others, New York, The Free Press – London, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1988.
REES, L., Auschwitz, Antwerpen, Manteau, 2005.
SAERENS, L., Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking (1844-1944), Tielt, Lannoo, 2000.
SCHREIBER, M., Stille rebellen. De overval op de 20e deportatietrein naar Auschwitz. Vertaald door J. GIELKENS, Amsterdam - Antwerpen, Atlas, 2001 (repr. 2002).
SCHUYTEN, M.C., Oorlogsdagboek, Antwerpsche nota’s 1940-1944, Antwerpen, De Techniek, maart 1945.
SLUYS, K., Het wonder van Boechout. Doorbraak van het Evangelie in Vlaanderen, Franeker, T. Wever, 1959.
STEINBERG, M., Le dossier Bruxelles-Auschwitz. La police SS et l’extermination des Juifs de Belgique. With a foreword of B. & S. KLARSFELD, an afterward of M. PIORO and judicial documents of the case Ehlers, Brussel, le Comité Belge de soutien à la partie civile dans le procès des officiers SS Ehlers, Asche, Canaris, responsables de la déportation des Juifs de Belgique, 1980.
STEINBERG, M., De ogen van het Monster. De holocaust dag in dag uit, Antwerpen - Baarn, Hadewijch, 1992.
STROM, M. & PARSONS, W.S., Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, Watertown (MA), Intentional Education, 1982.
TODOROV, T., Facing the Extreme. Moral life in the concentration camps, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997 (repr. 1999). Translated by A. DENNER & A. POLLACK of ID., Face à l’extrème, Paris, Editions de Seuil, 1991.
VAN DEN WIJNGAERT, M. e.a., België tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Antwerpen, Standaard, 2004.
VAN DOORSLAER, R. (ed.), DEBRUYNE, E., SEBERECHTS, F. & WOUTERS, N., Gewillig België. Overheid en Jodenvervolging tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, S.l., Meulenhoff – Manteau, 2007.
VAN PEE, R., Ik was 20 in 1944. Relaas uit Neuengamme en Blumenthal, Berchem, EPO, 1995.
VERSCHOORIS, M., Schrijven in de schaduw van de dood. Over thuiskomen, opduiken en achterblijven [1940-1955], Gent, Snoeck, 2005.
WOUTERS, N., Oorlogsburgemeesters 40/44. Lokaal bestuur en collaboratie in België, Tielt, Lannoo, 2004.
2. ARTICLES IN COMPILATIONS
CAESTEKER, F., Onverbiddelijk, maar ook clement. Het Belgische immigratiebeleid en de joodse vlucht uit Nazi-Duitsland, maart 1938-augustus 1939, in Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, 13/14 (2004) 99-139.
DE WEVER, B., De collaboratie in Vlaanderen, in J. GOTOVITCH & C. KESTELOOT (ed.), Het gewicht van het oorlogsverleden, Gent, Academia Press, 2003, 39-49.
FOGELMAN, E., The Rescuer Self, in M. BERENBAUM & A.J. PECK (ed.), The Holocaust and History. The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington – Indianopolis, Indiana University Press, 1998, 663-677.
OLINER, S., Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. A Portrait of Moral Courage, in M. BERENBAUM & A.J. PECK (ed.), The Holocaust and History. The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington – Indianopolis, Indiana University Press, 1998, 678-690.
SAERENS, L., Gewone Vlamingen? De jodenjagers van de Vlaamse SS in Antwerpen, 1942 (Deel 1), in Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, 15 (2005) 289-313.
SCHUYTEN, J., Tenminste Sylvieke, in J. DE VOLDER & L. WOUTERS, Van binnen weent mijn hart. De vervolging van de Antwerpse joden. Geschiedenis en herinnering, Antwerpen, Standaard, 1999, 120-126.
TEC, N., Helping Behavior and rescue During the Holocaust, in P. HAYES (ed.), Lessons and Legacies. The Meaning of the Holocaust in a changing World. Evanston (IL), Nortwestern University Press, 1991, 210-224.
TEC, N., Reflections on Rescuers, in M. BERENBAUM & A.J. PECK (ed.), The Holocaust and History. The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington – Indianopolis, Indiana University Press, 1998, 649-662.
VANDEN DAELEN, V., Het leven moet doorgaan. De joden in Antwerpen na de bevrijding, 1944-1945, in Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, 13/14 (2004) 141-185.
VAN DEN BERGHE, G., Geen holocaustmuseum (Kroniek), in Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, 13/14 (2004) 287-309.
3. ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS
Overdenking van Ds Appelo bij de begrafenisplechtigheid van br. K. Sluijs, in Vlaams Kerkblad, 12/3 (1965) 71-78.
SCHUYTEN, R., Advertentie in Vlaanderen voor Kristus, September 19 1939, p. 88.
ZUKIER, H, The "Mindless Years"?: A Reconsideration of the Psychological Dimensions of the Holocaust, 1938-1945, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11/2 (1997) 190-212.
4. ARTICLES IN NEWSPAPERS, JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES
Belgisch Staatsblad, 1947, page 10474.
Debra, de droevige Held van een nieuw Proces, in De Volksgazet, December 1 1949, p. 7.
Debra liet verschillende personen aanhouden, in De Volksgazet, December 2 1949, p. 7.
Vroegere Slachtoffers van Debra, schilderen diens Nazi-activiteit, in De Volksgazet,
December 3 1949, p. 7.
Laatste Getuigen in Zaak Debra worden gehoord, in De Volksgazet, December 8 1949, p. 6.
Oorlogsmisdadiger Thonon bevestigt de Verklikkersactiviteit van Debra, in De Volksgazet,
December 9 1949, p. 7.
De Auditeur eist de Doodstraf tegen Debra, in De Volksgazet, December 10 1949, p. 3.
Debra tot levenslange Dwangarbeid veroordeeld, in De Volksgazet, December 17 1949, p. 3.
Foto van de J.-F. Willemsherdenking te Boechout, 8.8.1943, in De Post, April 18 1982, p. 8-9.
MAES, J., Holocaustmuseum (Lezersbrief), in De Standaard, December 21 2001, p. 8.
OTTE, A., “Dit is geen oude geschiedenis”, in De Standaard, November 16 2005, p. 7.
Een zaak van aanhoudingen en hulp aan S.D., in Gazet Van Antwerpen, December 3 & 4 1949, p. 6.
5. UNPUBLISHED PAPERS
MAES, J., Daders slachtoffers omstanders. De vervolging van de Antwerpse joden: kiezen of niet kiezen, dat was de vraag (unpublished paper Christendom en Jodendom), K.U.Leuven, 2005.
MAES, J., Omstanders, slachtoffers, daders. Een verhaal van individuele keuzes en morele verantwoordelijkheid tijdens de jodenvervolging in de omgeving van Antwerpen (unpublished paper Kerk en theologie in de Nieuwste Tijd & Ethiek van vrede, oorlog en internationale betrekkingen), K.U.Leuven, 2006.
6. ARCHIVES
Antwerp, Provinciaal Archief Antwerpen
Wereldoorlog II, Oorlogsgebeurtenissen.Vragenlijst: de oorlog in de provincie Antwerpen.
Boechout, Heemkundige Kring “Het Speelhof”
Van Sintjan, Omzendschrijven 20.5.1941.
Vragenlijst [ingevuld door Klaas Sluys] van het Belgische Commissariaat voor Repatriëring – Dienst voor Opzoeking en Identificatie – met medewerking van het Rode Kruis van België.
Brussels, Auditoraat-Generaal
File Debra, Louis
File Van Sintjan, Gustaaf
File Lauterborn, Felix
File Schuermans, Jan
File Wyndaele, Emiel
File Pitz, Jan
Brussels, Ministerie van Volksgezondheid - Dienst Oorlogsslachtoffers (DO)
File Altbaum, Isaias
File Bremer, Karin
File Bremer, Sophia
File Coenen, Philomena
File Finkel, Markus
File Gross, Israel
File Grosz, Alexander
File Grosz, Annie
File Grosz, Paula
File Grosz, Zoltan
File Grunspan, Chaja-Syma
File Grunspan, Sara Esther
File Hendrickx, Jacobus D. Isidorus
File Hendrickx, Marie Carolus
File Hanfling, Majer
File Karfiol, Wilhelm
File Landau, Philippe
File Nadel, Hersz
File Nadel, Manfred
File Neumann, Estera
File Pakula, Gertrude
File Polak, Jonas
File Reichman, Alexander
File Reichman, Andre
File Reichman, Catharina
File Reichman, Joseph
File Reichman, Marie
File Reichman, Maurice
File Reichman, Suzanne
File Schvartz, Julianna
File Sluys, Klaas
Fiche originale du fichier des “enfants cachés” constitué par le Comité de Défense des Juifs
concernant Madame REICHMAN, Sylvie
concernant Madame VAN ENGEL, Joséphine
Brussels, Dienst Vreemdelingenzaken (DV)
File Debra, Louis, 7079799
File Finkel, Gottfried, A280367
File Finkel, Markus, 1571278
File Finkel, Selma, 2014544
File Freifeld Chana, 7373662
File Gnazic, Elias,1501316
File Gnazic, Hanna, A375136
File Gross, Israel, A318886
File Grosz, Paula, A397121
File Grosz, Zoltan, 1365384
File Grunspan, Isaak, 1522346
File Grunspan, Joel, 1502741
File Grunspan, Chaja, 7005589 of 1522347
File Grunspan Lea, 1522348
File Hanfling, Majer, A302999
File Hönig, Edith, 3219080
File Hönig, Lily, A280367
File Hönig, Sigmund, A213361
File Karfiol, Benjamin, 16262023
File Karfiol, Danuta, 2091923
File Karfiol, Renée, 7248099
File Karfiol, Sylvain, 7373662
File Karfiol, Wilhelm, A373662
File Kron, Karl, A323181
File Lachter, Leon, 1381846
File Nadel, Hersz, A344334
File Nadel, Manfred, A393351
File Nadel, Max, A375136
File Opstelten, Nelly, A17360
File Pakula, Gertrude, A363959
File Reichman, Alexander, 1298478
File Reichman, Benjamin, 1379678
File Reichman, Céline, 2539718
File Reichman, Esther-Regina, 2101845
File Reichman, Eugène, 1258289
File Reichman, Joseph, 1298479
File Reichman, Louis, 1412232
File Reichman, Mauritius, 1420646
File Reichman, Paula, 2539717
File Rodriguez, Jacob, 1136784
File Safir, Eisig, 1484797
File Safir, Renée, 2106954
File Schindler, Heinz, 2014544
File Sluys, Klaas, A150932
File Van Buuren, Geertruida, A67798
File Winter, Herman Jan, 1620404
File Zawadski, Henry, 822448
Hasselt, Ministry of Finances, Administration of the Land Registry
Extract of the ‘kadastrale legger’ of the town of Hasselt 1e Afdeling, Artikel 6048
Mechelen, Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDV)
Collection of Pictures
Files of the Persecution of Jews in Belgium
Archive Jan Maes
1. (Telephonic) Talks
Amir, Michlean (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, USA)
Blokland, Johan
Funkleder, Jacques (The Belgian Society The Hidden Child)
Gnazic Nadel, Hanna (Israel)
Grynberg, Sabine (Secrétariat Politique de l’Ambassade d’Israël en Belgique & au Luxembourg)
Hanuse, G. (Brussel, Auditoraat-Generaal)
Haverals, François (Heemkundige Kring Boechout,“Het Speelhof”)
Hendrickx Rooze, Liliane
Huisman, Jaap (NL)
Huisman, Jeff (NL)
Joosten , Marius
Laureys, Eric (SOMA)
Marcovici-Reichman, Paula
Michield, Marc (organiser commemoration convoy XX, Boortmeerbeek)
Reichman Elboom, Régine (Israel)
Reichman Lednicer, Sylvie (USA)
Saerens, Lieven (SOMA)
Safir-Edelstein, Renee
Schuyten Hickman, Margaret (USA)
Schuyten, Peter (USA)
Schuyten, Wim (USA)
Sluys Eikelboom, Dora (NL)
Stichting 1940-1945 (NL)
Verhaegen, Liliane
Zuster Thérèse (Archive of the Sisters of St.-Vincentius à Paulo; Gijzegem)
2. E-mails
Eikelboom-Sluys, Dora (NL)
Finkel Karmi, Danielle (Israel)
Finkel Regosin, Judith (Israel)
Haverals, François (Heemkundige Kring Boechout,“Het Speelhof”)
Hönig Sanders, Edith (NL)
Janssens, Guido
Joosten, Marius
Laplasse, Jan (SOMA, B)
Nadel Borsuk, Ilana (Israel)
Osbun, Richard (in opdracht van zijn grootvader Schuyten, Wim) (USA)
Reichman Lednicer, Sylvie (USA)
Schram, Laurence (JMDV, B)
Schuyten Hickman, Margaret (USA)
Schuyten, Peter (USA)
Sproelants, Christophe (communication service of the town of Boechout)
Rooze, Frank
Rooze, Joop (NL)
Vitto, Steven (Registry of Holocaust Survivors, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, USA)
Vondeling, Cobie (USA)
Williams Lyzenga, Ann (USA)
Williams White, Gwyneth (USA)
Wouters, Lieve
3. Written information and letters
De Bruin, W. J. (Embassy of the Netherlands) to Jan Maes, 12/20/2005.
Funkleder, Jacques (The Belgian Society The Hidden Child) to Jan Maes, 3/30/2006.
Paldiel, Mordecai (Director Department of the Righteous Yad Vashem Israel) to Jan Maes, 3/9/2006.
Rooze Van Den Dries, Greet, notes with pictures for Jan Maes, 21/1/2005.
Schuyten, Wim (VS) to Jan Maes, 10/28/2005; 12/1/2005; 2/9/2006.
Sluys Eikelboom, Dora (NL) to Jan Maes, 5/28/2007
4. Pictures
Clémeur, Hugo
Hönig Sanders, Edith (NL)
Huisman, Jaap (NL)
Reichman Marcovici, Paula
Rooze Van Den Dries, Greet
Rooze, Joop (NL)
Rooze Quak, Lies (NL)
Schuyten Hickman, Margaret (USA)
Schuyten, Wim (USA)
Sluys Eikelboom, Dora (NL)
Van Puyenbroek, Simonne
Vroon, Tony
5. DVD
Interview 27861. Sylvie Lednicer Date: April 2, 1997 (Survivors of the Shoah), Visual History Foundation, 1997.
LEDNICER, O., Sylvie Reichman Lednicer visiting Mrs. Dewilde, Korbeek-Lo, 9/12/2005.
Archive Dora Sluys
The balances of 1944 and 1945 of the “Industrie & Handelsmaatschappij Boechout”
SCHUYTEN, J., Van 31 januari 1943 tot juli 16 of 17 1944 (Testimony written on demand of the family in the United States), December 1995.
Archive Marnix Sluys
Letter from Klaas Sluys on 9/22/1943 to his wife Julia Schuyten.
SCHUYTEN, J., Klaas Sluys 1911-1965 (Short biography of Klaas Sluys, by his wife, Julia Schuyten), 1965.
Sentence dd 4/1/1943 of Klaas Sluys, Feldgericht, Feldkommandatur 520, St.L. VI nr.60/43
Archive Margaret Schuyten Hickman
530 pages of letters from September 14 1938 untill Mai 11 1948 (and some diary fragments) between René Schuyten and his fiancée and future wife Nelly Opstelten.
A later, handwritten English translation of the war diary of René Schuyten, soldier in the Belgian Army from 5/9/1940 to 5/30/1940.
Letter of 6/8/1993 from Betty G. Cantor in Atlanta, to Nelly [Opstelten] Schuyten.
Letter of 8/23/1993 from Mordecai Paldiel, Director Dept. For the Righteous, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem from to Nelly Schuyten.
Letter of 1995 from Julia Schuyten Sluys to Nelly Opstelten.
Handwritten presentation of Nelly Opstelten for Paul [Hickmans’] German lesson in class, April 12 1994.
Notes by Margaret Hickman-Schuyten of the stories her mother Nelly told her on the flight to Belgium in 1989.
Archive Joop Rooze
Diary annotations by Truus van Buuren Roozen written down on December 31 1944.
Archive Tony Vroom
Picture of the J.-F.Willems commemoration at Boechout: 8/8/1943, in De Post, April 18 1982, p.8-9.
B. ELECTRONISCHE BRONNEN EN WERKEN
Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, http://www.facinghistory.org/campus/reslib.nsf/resourcebooks/Holocaust+and+Human+Behavior?OpenDocument (admittance Mai 17 2007).
Letter from Julia Schuyten to Yad Vashem of January 8 1996, http://users.pandora.be/de-living/Dossier%20De%20vervolging%20van%20Antwerpse%20joden%20in%20Boechout/Brief%20van%20Julia%20Schuyten%20aan%20Yad%20Vashem%208.1.1996.doc (admittance on July 9 2006).
The Mechelen Jewish Museum of Deportation and the Resistance, http://www.cicb.be/eng/start_eng.htm (admittance May 8 2007).
PALINCKX, K., De dood valt uit de hemel. V-bommen op Antwerpen, in Knack, 2004, http://www.knack.be/CMarticles/ShowArticleZoek.asp?articleID=40693§ionID=1364 (admittance on July 9 2006).
C. MOVIE AND TELEVISION
DVD
Auschwitz. The Nazis & the ‘Final Solution’, BBC, 2005.
Judentransport XX, Eye2Eye Media Productie, 2003.
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