A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  By the outbreak of World War II, the great majority of Antwerp's more than fifty thousand Jews were earning their living in the diamond trade. It was a religious community dominated by devout Orthodox Jews from the east, many of them members of the emotional and flamboyant Hasidic movement. In the early twentieth century the Orthodox community in Antwerp was modifying and modernizing—not drastically, but enough to worry some of the traditionalists from Poland. So to maintain the old ways, they sent for a Hasidic rabbi from Katowice who had a reputation for unerring orthodoxy. The rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, arrived in 1912 with his wife, six sons, and three daughters.

  Rottenberg was a rabbi of considerable energy and charisma, and he kept the religious community not only together but unusually traditional for a Western community. One of his last official acts was to marry Dwora and Hershl Silberman in 1941. Dwora's family was also from Lodz, having left for Antwerp in 1927, when she was eight years old. Like many immigrants with no particular knowledge of diamonds, Dwora's father had become a broker. Dwora‘s brother, having the advantage of growing up around diamonds, became a dealer, which required an eye for and a depth of knowledge about gems.

  Hershl Silberman's family had-also prospered in Antwerp. They owned a three-story house on Simonsstraat in the heart of the diamond district. This street, which farther up changes its name to Pelikaanstraat, is long and straight and runs along the elevated train tracks to the station.

  By the time Mordechai Rottenberg married Dwora and Hershl on October 29, 1941, the Germans had occupied Antwerp for almost a year and a half. Every week, Jewish life was becoming more restricted. Banks could not accept Jewish deposits. Jews could not operate stores. The traditional Orthodox wedding at night under the stars was now impossible, because Jews were not allowed outside after seven o'clock in the evening. Rabbi Rotten-berg had to make one of his rare compromises and perform the wedding ceremony during the day, inside the synagogue. Then lists of Jews who were to report to the train station for deportation to “work camps” started appearing. Dwora's parents feared for their children, because they thought that labor camps would be looking for young people. So they persuaded the newly weds to flee to France. Tens of thousands of Belgian Jews had already gone there, including Dwora's brother and his wife, who were now in Lyons. The Jewish underground could get them through the occupied zone to southern France.

  But just as Hershl and Dwora were about to cross the French border, Dwora declared that she could not leave her parents, she had to go back to Antwerp, this was all a mistake. But the underground responded that they had already taken too many risks to move them and there was no turning back; she would have to wait until the war was over to return. Among the last Jews to escape Belgium, the decision was out of her hands. Yet it would torment her for the rest of her life.

  Lyons was not safe, either. Dwora's brother and his wife were caught in one of the French police roundups and deported to Auschwitz. Dwora and Hershl spent the war years moving across southern France, from the Swiss to the Spanish border, looking for a place to hide.

  At the time of the Liberation of France, they were in a rural area in central France. When they saw men from the FFI Resistance group take three Germans prisoner, they realized the Nazi occupation of France had ended. One of the Germans, an officer, was arguing his case to the Resistance fighters. Dwora heard him say in clear German, ‘What we did, everybody else wanted to have done. But we were the fools who got the job done.”

  Seven months pregnant, Dwora immediately tried to get back to her family—she did not want to wait for the war to be over. But the Belgium border was closed, as the war moved to the Ardennes. Hershl and Dwora stood by the side of a muddy road outside Lille while the Allied army slogged toward its next rendezvous. After talking a British Army driver into giving them a ride, they arrived in Belgium in the back of his canvas-covered truck. The driver even gave them chocolate. Their first sight of Antwerp was with an orange flash across the sky, followed by an earth-shaking boom.

  Although forced to retreat, the Germans had not been able to destroy the city's harbor, which was now the best undamaged port across the channel from England. They were trying to hit the city with V-l and V-2 rockets. The VI would make a tremendous noise as it streaked over the city; The V2 was silent. The anti-aircraft battery outside of town was heard, then nothing until suddenly a building blew up. The Germans never hit the port, but one day, as though guided by vengeful fate, a rocket hit the Rex Cinema while it was showing a matinee, and hundreds were killed. Decades later, this incident remained one of those defining differences between Jews and non-Jews who had lived through the war. Mention the Rex to a non-Jew, and he would talk about the day the rocket hit. Mention the Rex to one of the few surviving Jews, and he would talk of another day, April 14, 1941, when the Rex had offered a special matinee showing of a Nazi movie called Jud Suss, or Suss, the Jew. It presented the story of a Jew in the Middle Ages who had risen to a high position in Frankfurt am Main and squeezed taxes out of the good Christian people until they were ruined. After the screening the local people marched down the Pelikaanstraat, smashing Jewish shop windows. When they got to the Van Den Nestlei synagogue, they broke into the building and carried the Torahs out onto the street. For a short time they seemed content simply to throw the scrolls around and unwind and abuse them. But they finally burned the synagogue and then marched on to lay siege to two other principal synagogues in the city.

  WHEN HERSHL and the very pregnant Dwora arrived in Antwerp, they went to the Silberman family house on Simonsstraat, across from the elaborate masonry of the elevated tracks. The strangers who were living there assured them that there were no Silbermans in the house.

  On December 28, 1944, Dwora gave birth to their first child, a girl. Knowing nothing about babies, she turned to the flourishing black market to buy as much food as she could. To Dwora, Antwerp looked almost prosperous. There was trade and busy shops, and she bitterly reflected that the Flemish seemed to have thrived on selling to the Germans. She bought food as though she expected it to vanish from the markets. Soon her parents would come back from somewhere. Her brother and his wife would be coming back from Auschwitz. They would need a lot of good food. They would be so hungry.

  To the disappointment of the people living in the Simonsstraat house, HershPs family did return, and after a court battle the Silbermans got their house back. But no one in Dwora's family was among the returning survivors. Now Dwora was certain that her instinct had been right: She should never have left them in Antwerp and gone off with Hershl.

  In March 1942, when the Germans had begun deporting Belgian Jews to Auschwitz, they had not taken only young people who would be good laborers, as Dwora's parents had expected. The deportation was not, in fact, about labor at all. Her parents had been taken, and so had the aging Rabbi Mordechai Rottenberg, along with his wife and children. But the Rottenbergs’ daughter, Recha, had married a Swiss Hasid, Yitzchak Sternbuch, and during the war the couple lived at the Lake Geneva resort of Montreux. From this position of relative safety, they had smuggled Jews into Switzerland and had then gone on to ever wilder schemes, such as swapping Jews for money and equipment. In her search for niches of safety in the Final Solution, Recha had discovered that the Germans would not hurt Jews who had South American passports. The Germans had a vague idea that at some point they could swap these South American Jews for Germans living in South America. The Paraguayan government was delighted that its passports were worth something to people with hard currency, and it made the documents available for a handsome fee.

  Among the hundreds for whom Recha obtained these papers were her two brothers, Chaim and Jozef. As a result, they were sent to a labor camp in Germany instead of a death camp. Both brothers had inherited some of their father's charisma, and Jozef in particular had an easy charm and an impish wit. Before the war, he had taken to Antwerp's commercial world, becoming an entrepreneur who understood the role of money in getting things done. After their siste
r got them South American papers, it was Jozef who tried to get money to Sam Perl and the others in the transit camp, so that if they were sent to Auschwitz and could jump off the train, as many were talking of doing, they would have some cash.

  Jozefs brother Chaim was a man whom most people immediately liked. All his life and even for years after his death, mentioning the name Chaim Rottenberg to anyone who knew him would elicit a warm smile and a shake of the head, accompanied by a statement like, “Chaim—he was a personality!” Chaim was not an entrepreneur like Jozef. He was more like a biblical prophet, perhaps an Isaiah, declaring, “Set thy house in order.” Tall and lean, with precise elongated features, his peering eyes made it clear at one glance that nothing would deter this man once he had made up his mind. His mind was usually focused, as in the oldest of Jewish traditions, on the law.

  While Chaim and Jozef were in the labor camp, Recha managed to get them a shipment of matzoh for Passover through the Red Cross. Since there was a general shortage of food, religious and nonreligious Jews alike were grateful for this package. Chaim distributed the matzoh, but before getting a piece, each prisoner had to sign a written statement that he would never eat bread with leavening on Passover.

  Recha was able to get both her brothers and hundreds of other Jews to Switzerland. But in 1944 the Paraguayan scheme collapsed, and the remaining Jews with South American passports were sent to Auschwitz, where only three survived. Among those who did not survive were Recha's parents.

  After the war, Recha continued her work. The DPs—displaced persons, thousands of homeless Jews in Allied-supervised refugee camps in Germany—needed help. As she traveled to these camps in the charred remains of the Third Reich, Recha tried, although not always successfully, to observe traditional religious practices, which meant that all work activity had to stop on Friday evening until Saturday evening.

  One Friday afternoon in late 1945, she was traveling in Germany and came upon a house for young Orthodox women in Landsberg am Lech. This was the same beautiful Bavarian mountain village where Hitler had been imprisoned in 1923 following the failed putsch; he had passed his time there dictating Mein Kampf. The Orthodox women were all survivors who were trying to make contacts to get out of Europe and into Palestine. Among them were a young woman named Rifka Melchior and her younger sister Frankel. In January they had been among two thousand Jewish women forced to march from labor camps in central Germany, away from the Americans and the Russians. Once a day, the Germans had fed them each a piece of bread, but first they had taken the ones that were too weak to go on and shot them by the side of the road. When the women arrived in Czechoslovakia in May, only two hundred of them were left. Rifka weighed less than seventy-five pounds.

  Recha spent the Sabbath with the survivors in the house at Landsberg am Lech. She later returned on another Sabbath and found that Rifka, who was now working for a Jewish charity, was about to leave for the Jewish holidays. As Rifka started to say goodbye to Recha, Recha informed her that she could not leave. Rifka had to come with her to Brussels instead. “I have work for you in Brussels,” Recha told Rifka, with a smile and a peculiar wink.

  Rifka, whose only dream was to get to Palestine, followed Recha to Belgium anyway. Recha was a woman who had once talked her way across the Swiss border, badgered the Gestapo into releasing twelve Jewish prisoners, then taken them back across to Switzerland. Few people could say no to her. It was a Rottenberg family trait.

  Her brother, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, was the work she had in mind for Rifka. Among the strictly Orthodox, arranged marriages are commonplace at about the age of eighteen. Rifka was already twenty-one when she married Chaim under a canopy beneath the stars, as prescribed by law, on the terrace of a hotel set against the background of dark, glittering Lake Geneva and the silhouette of the Swiss Alps. But even in this setting it was hard to feel romantic. Maybe it was hard to feel anything at all. So many of the people in their lives had died terrible deaths. They were still just learning of it—of Rifka's four sisters and mother gassed at Auschwitz, of her two brothers who had been shot, of her father who had lain down and died in Poland. Her sister Frankel was her only relative at the wedding. After the wedding, the Rottenbergs went to Antwerp, and Frankel went alone to Palestine.

  JEWS CENTERED their lives on checking Red Cross lists, sometimes more than once a day. The Red Cross list of known survivors was easy to scan because it was never very long. But it wasn't infallible, and you never knew who you would run into on the Belgielei or Pelikaanstraat. Survivors would sight each other by chance from across a street and run up to each other and trade horror stories. Where were you? And one would tell the other, and then ask the same. Then would come the real questions: “Is your brother back? Have you seen my cousin?” Everyone had a few people for whom they were still looking.

  Simple events took on tremendous significance. The birth of a child, such as the Silberman girl, or the first wedding, which was Sam Perl's marriage to Anna Baum, who had also hidden in Na-mur, became a major community event. As late as 1951, people were hugging each other in the street over news that a new Rotten-berg had been born—Jozefs first child, Mordechai. Hundreds attended his circumcision. Later, Chaim and Rifka would also name their first son Mordechai.

  Chaim Rottenberg performed the Perl-Baum wedding in a synagogue on Terliststraat, near the diamond district. Of the five main synagogues, it was the only one still in good enough condition to use. What was left of the Jewish community came to celebrate, along with Christians from Namur who had saved Anna and Sam.

  For hundreds of thousands of Jews, Antwerp, like Paris, was just a place where they could try to find passage to Palestine or North America. But because of those who stayed to work in the diamond industry, the Antwerp Jewish community grew after the war from a few hundred to a few thousand. It became even more dependent on the diamond industry than before. Jozef Rottenberg—no bearded prophet like his brother, but an amiable, clean-shaven businessman—was one of the few who did not go into diamonds. Seeing that credit lines had opened up for new businesses, he started a small pharmaceutical manufacturing company with a few employees.

  Sam Perl, whose entire family had been in diamonds ever since they had emigrated to Antwerp from Transylvania when he was a small boy, now in his early twenties became a sawer. It takes ninety minutes, more or less, depending on the stone, for a rotating diamond saw to bisect a rough diamond, a preliminary step in the gems’ manufacture. As he got more work, he hired a few sawers to work under him, until the payroll reached fifteen, which in diamonds is a factory.

  Another man from a diamond family who had also jumped off the transport train to Auschwitz was Israel Kornfeld. He too had been captured and put on a second train. And he too had jumped again. The second time, he managed to get to Switzerland, where he and his wife, son, and two daughters were able to live quietly throughout the war. When they got back to Antwerp, they found a small old house to rent on the other side of the train tracks from the Pelikaanstraat. Israel had had to reinforce the banisters and door jambs in the shaky little house to enable it to withstand three wild children, who had managed to break almost everything in their sturdier Swiss home.

  Israel had learned diamond cleaving in the 1930s, after he had emigrated to Antwerp from Poland. His wife had come from Poland, too, and had worked slavish garment jobs to earn money to send back to her family. But once Israel started cleaving, he earned enough money for both of them. After the war they returned to Antwerp from Switzerland, confident that he could again bring in a comfortable income from cleaving. At least, it would have been a comfortable income, if it were only three children—or four, since they soon had another daughter—who were supported by it. But Israel Kornfeld was that rare kind of religious man who believed that ultimately what matters to God is how you treat other people. And so in his small house he used his diamond cleaver's earnings to support anywhere from ten to thirty people at a time. If he saw somebody on the street who looked hungry, he would ask
them if they needed a meal or a place to stay.

  He had done this before the war too. But after the war, with Antwerp awash in camp survivors—this was his moment. He had his children gather flour sacks and stuff them with straw for beds, then run over to the medieval city center to buy olive drab U.S. Army surplus blankets. Survivors would come and stay for a week or a month or several months. There was always floor space for another stuffed sack. They ate potatoes. The children would peel potatoes for two dozen or more people every day. On special days there might be a piece of meat in the potatoes, but the basic diet was just potatoes.

  The gaunt strangers, mostly men, would sit around on their sacks and trade spectacularly horrifying stories about brutality and degradation in places called Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buch-enwald. Israel Kornfeld understood that they needed to talk about it. They would talk to each other or to his wife, but mainly they talked to him. Not only was he a good listener, but he had the perfect job for it, because he cleaved at home. As he listened, Israel, bent over a small wooden box, would carefully place a knife along grooves in the diamond he was working on, and with experienced fingers he would split off pieces along the grain of the crystal. To an outsider, it looked like whittling. He had done it for years, and it was easy for him to listen to people talk while he worked.