The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  The Spiessens were Belgian farmers in the small town of Boom, near Antwerp. The couple offered shelter on their farm to two Jews, Cecile Seiden and her mother, from Antwerp. The Spiessens’ son Harry and his wife Joss took them from Antwerp to Boom hidden in a hay cart. Cecile Seiden later recalled: ‘Along the way we passed many patrols that examined Harry and Joss’s papers. We were hidden under hay and vegetables in his little open truck. At one of the checkpoints they rifled the hay looking for contraband and anything else that they could confiscate. When the rifle entered the hay, it went past my mother’s ear and she whimpered. The guard snarled: “What do you have there?” Harry answered, “A pig, he must have grunted!” Lucky for us, he believed Harry. They let us pass and didn’t confiscate the pig. Joss and Harry risked their lives for us, they could have been shot.’

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

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

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

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

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

  Later, Cecile Seiden and her mother were to make their way to Switzerland. Her father, taken from Belgium to Auschwitz, was one of the few Belgian deportees who survived.20

  Many of the rescuers in Belgium, as in other countries, were people with few means: hard-working farmers like the Spiessens. It was a ‘fairly poor socialist family, living in the miners’ county (Borinage) of Belgium’ that sheltered the young Goldschläger boy. That boy’s younger brother Alain, born after the war, later wrote: ‘My father in his naiveté had given my brother the name Christian in 1939, thinking that the Germans would not pursue a child with that name! The Socialist Party had a strong tradition of anti-racism and anti-persecution.’ Alain Goldschläger added: ‘Belgium has a remarkable record of saving children. I think it was perceived as a way to fight the Germans. Anti-Semitism was also not as rooted as in some other countries like Holland. The organization for helping Jewish children in Brussels was quite admirable and extended, involving a large number of non-Jews and established services. A Catholic newspaper summed up the position quite well: “Even if we do not like Jews, they do not deserve the persecution.” There was a basic “good will” that manifested itself either by active participation in the rescue, or more often by a passive non-involvement in the persecution which gave room and time for others to act.’21

  In Brussels, Father Anton de Breuker, the pastor of St Marie Scharbeeck church, gave shelter to ten-year-old Dora Londner-Conforti, after her parents had been taken to the deportation centre at Dossin, from where they were deported to Auschwitz and their deaths. To protect the girl’s identity Father Anton adopted her, and, a year later, moved her to a Carmelite convent ‘that had been specially instructed to conceal Jewish girls’.22

  Elisabeth Maxwell has recorded the story of Madame Ovart, who ran a home where Jewish children were hidden. ‘One Whitsun, the Christian children had gone back home and only the Jewish children were left. The Gestapo raided the building and, having terrified the children, took them away for deportation. They also arrested Mme Ovart. When they expressed surprise as to why a Christian would hide Jewish children, she answered, “I am a Belgian…Here, we do not ask for children’s identity to teach them to read and write!” She died in Ravensbrück and her husband, who was also arrested, died in Buchenwald.’23

  Shortly before being deported to Auschwitz, Chana and Benjamin Borzykowski managed to place their four-year-old son Jacky in a kindergarten in Brussels. There he was cared for by Andrée Geulen, a member both of the Belgian underground and of the Committee for the Defence of the Jews. She entrusted him to two sisters, Madeleine and Marcel de Meulemeester, also members of the resistance. They, in turn, brought Jacky to their brother and sister-in-law, John and Josiane de Meulemeester. He hid with them from 1943 to 1944 until it became too dangerous, when the de Meulemeester sisters took him to Father de Wolf Desirée in the village of Buggenhout. The priest arranged for Jacky to stay on the farm of Franz and Maria Julia van Gerwen. The boy lived with the van Gerwens and their two daughters, Maria Desirée and Amelie, for over two years; during this time he was baptized a Catholic, and lived and worked as part of the family.

  Chana and Benjamin Borzykowski were murdered at Auschwitz. Jacky’s aunt found him after her own liberation from Dachau; later he went to Israel with a group of other orphans.24

  Both Catholic and Protestant churches in Belgium were active in helping Jews. The head of the Protestant church in Belgium, Pastor Marc Boegner, issued clear instructions to his flock that they should help persecuted Jews, and himself helped large numbers of Jews to find sanctuary in France. One institution to which he sent Jews for safety was the Adventists’ Seminary at Collognes, in Haute Savoie, not far from the Swiss border.25

  Many Belgian nunneries and convents, too, gave sanctuary to Jewish children and pretended they were Christian. In Namur, Father Joseph André, an abbot, found room within his monastery and in monasteries and nunneries elsewhere for as many as a hundred children. After liberation he brought them all to the Jewish community leaders.26 Nor was this the sum total of his efforts on behalf of Jews. An American rabbi, then a chaplain with the United States forces, Captain Harold Saperstein, told the New York Times shortly after the war of how Father André ‘got local Catholic families to hide Jews in their households. He gave up his own bed to Jewish refugees, and during the entire period slept on the floor of his study. He carried food to families in hiding, and messages from parents to children. All this was done from his own home, next door to the hotel used as Gestapo headquarters, now taken over for our billet. During the final months of Nazi occupation he was compelled to go into hiding himself, his own life being endangered. During the course of two years he saved more than two hundred lives.’ Rabbi Saperstein also reported that, with liberation, Father André made sure that orphaned Jewish children who had been hidden in Catholic institutions were given into the charge of Jewish people, ‘who could ill afford the additional loss of small numbers of Jewish children after their overwhelming losses of recent years’.27 Also among the institutions that hid Jews were the Convent of the Franciscan Sisters in Bruges, the Protestant orphanage at Uccle, and the convent of the Sisters of Don Bosco, in Courtrai, where fourteen Jewish children were hidden. Only two of the nuns here were aware that any of the children were Jewish; even the Jewish children themselves, among them eight-year-old Leon Fischler, did not know that any of the other children were
Jewish.28

  Four Jewish girls were given refuge at the Sisters of Saint Mary convent school in the village of Wezembeek-Oppem, near Brussels; six were saved from deportation at the Dominican convent of Lubbeek, near Hasselt, hidden in the cellar by the Mother Superior when the Gestapo came to the convent in search of Belgians to deport for forced labour.29

  When Ursula Klipstein’s German-born parents, Irma and Leo, were arrested—also German-born, she was then twelve years old—she approached a Christian friend of the family, who found her a hiding place in a convent near Braine-l’Alleud. Run by the Sisters of Saint Mary, the convent was home to twenty-five students, half of whom were Jewish children in hiding. Ursula, who was given the name Janine Hambenne, stayed at the convent from June 1943 until the liberation in September 1944.

  After their arrest, Ursula’s parents were taken to the transit camp at Malines. One evening the inmates were allowed a cultural evening, which was attended by the German staff as well as the prisoners. At this event, Irma Klipstein read out a poem she had written about camp life. The camp commandant, who recognized by her accent that she was from the same part of Germany as himself, was impressed by her poem, and in appreciation arranged for her and husband to be employed in the camp, rather than be deported to the East. Irma continued to work in Malines as a maid, and Leo as a carpenter, until liberation.30

  The smallest of Jewish children were in danger: each deportation from Belgium, as from France and Holland, contained young children, often deported without their parents. A Christian nurse who worked at the Brussels hospital where Marguerite-Rose Birnbaum was born on 4 February 1943, arranged for her parents to hide in an abbey in Limbourg, with a priest, Armand Elens. The priest spoke with his sister, Marie-Josephe Dincq, saying, in code, that he had a suit and dress (that is, Lazar and Frida Birnbaum) and a small dress (Marguerite-Rose). He added that he would keep the suit and dress, and asked his sister to pick up the small dress. Madame Dincq picked up seven-month-old Marguerite-Rose and brought her to her home in Arendonk, where she lived with her husband Pierre and three children, aged between ten and six. Marguerite-Rose was baptized in St Joseph’s church as the godchild of Pierre and Marie-Josephe Dincq. Pierre Dincq, a member of the Belgian resistance, was arrested in the spring of 1944 and died in Dachau. In the summer of 1945 the Birnbaums retrieved their daughter, by that time a healthy two-year-old.31

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

  While Annette and Margot were in hiding, their mother was deported to Auschwitz on the penultimate transport from Belgium in 1944. After learning that both parents had been killed, Clementine and Edouard van Buggenhout sought to adopt the girls, but the village priest would not sanction the adoption ‘since there was no formal indication that this would have been the wish of the parents’. In due course the two girls were found a home with a Jewish family in the United States.32

  As more and more ‘Hidden Children’ began to tell their stories, the courage of Father Bruno—the Reverend Henri Reynders—became more and more well known. For those he saved he was a true ‘hero’.33 He helped find places of safety for 320 Jewish children, dozens of whom have given testimony to his courage.34

  Father Bruno, a Benedictine monk, had paid a visit to Germany in 1938 and had been distressed by what he saw. ‘I was strolling in a busy street,’ he later recalled. ‘Everywhere I saw insulting signs: “Jude = Judas”, “Juden heraus” or “Hier sind Juden nicht erwünschen”. It shocked me greatly, but what truly revolted me was the following incident: I saw an old man arriving, bearded, dressed in a caftan, wearing an old black hat, in short the stereotyped Jew. This old man walked stooped, not daring to raise his eyes, hiding his face with his hand. Passersby walked away from him as if he had the plague, or they bullied him, or pointed a finger and sneered at him. This really upset me, this segregation, this contempt, this arrogance, this cruel stupidity, no…it was unbearable! It still lingers in my memory and makes me nauseous.’35

  While serving as a Belgian army chaplain in 1940, Father Bruno was wounded, captured and made a prisoner of war. It would be a year before he was released. In 1942 he was sent by the Father Superior of his order to take up the post of chaplain at a small Catholic institution, the Home for the Blind at Hodbomont. ‘He quickly finds out’, as his nephew Dr Michel Reynders later wrote, ‘that the director, a Mr Walter Bieser, can see as well as he, and so does an elderly couple from Vienna, the Ashkenazys, and a Mr Silbermann. It is, in reality, a front for the true mission of the Home: to hide Jews in danger of being arrested. The management and most of the guests, including five or six genuinely blind children, are all Jews.’

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

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

  Michel Reynders, then a teenager, played his own part in his uncle’s rescue endeavours, serving, he writes, as ‘an occasional letter carrier or escort for a brief trip within the city of Brussels’.36

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

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

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

  Just before the German withdrawal, Father Bruno performed a final act of rescue in Brussels, in the Place du Chatelain. There he brought, and then found a home for, three children who had escaped the possibility of a last-minute deportation and spent the previous night in the Forest of Soignes: ‘I never saw’, Father Bruno recalled, ‘children so eager to let themselves be scrubbed and cleansed in my basement, and with such exuberance!’ He took the three children, aged eight and ten, to the Daughters of Charity in Asse, eight miles from Brussels, after which he returned to Brussels on foot, just in time to see German troops leave the city, never to return.’37