I Would Never Have Done It For Money
“There is a story about Clare Boothe Luce [1903-1987] complaining that
she was bored with hearing about the Holocaust.
A Jewish friend of hers said he perfectly understood
her sensitivity to the matter; in fact,
he had the same sense or repetitiveness and fatigue,
hearing about the crucifixion.”
Herbert Gold, Selfish Like Me
Oh, how we wish her testimony was digitized!
And we would have been privileged to know her!
It’s there. Written on the last day of July 1945. Not hidden. An English language translation is preserved in Washington at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Unhappily, it’s just not available to us.
Que lastima! What a shame!
Detail of metal structure framing the platform at the National Monument to the Jewish Martyrs of Belgium.
Happily, Bard University Emerita Professor of Sociology Suzanne Vromen’s 2008 Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgium Nuns and their Daring Rescue of Young Jews From the Nazis gives us a small glimpse of her amazing courage and generosity of spirit.
On May 20, 1943, after being tipped-off by a local spy, agents of the Gestapo raided the Brussels-area convent of the Sisters of the Most Holy Savior; they were searching for fifteen Jewish girls being hidden in the convent, who – if found - would almost certainly be shipped to an extermination camp.
Acting quickly, Mother Superior Marie-Aurelie begged for a one-day delay in to pack the girls’ meager belongings and prepare them for their journey. We suspect Mother Superior was a consummate actress with a unique flair for the dramatic. Having secured a reprieve, she notified the Belgian Resistance either directly or through the local parish priest.
When two men from the Resistance arrive, prepared to whisk the girls through a back door, Sister Marie-Aurelie insisted that they shoot her – dramatic proof to the Nazis that she had tried to prevent the escape. Instead, after taking the girls to safe hiding places throughout Brussels, the men returned, tied-up and gagged all the nuns, and staged a ransacking – cutting telephone lines, overturning furniture, and making it appear that the Sisters had put up a brave fight.
German agents arrived the next day and left angry, deflated and empty-handed.
To paraphrase the ‘70s era margarine commercial: “It’s not smart to mess with Mother Superior.”
Sister Marie-Aurelie (center) and the nuns of the Couvent Du Tres Saint Sauveur, responsible for hiding fifteen Jewish children.
In neighboring Holland, almost ninety percent of Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust. However, Belgium had suffered under a German invasion during First World War and its citizens perceived the German onslaught as a collective threat, transforming their compassion into organization.
Unlike Italy and Denmark, where Jews had been a part of national life for centuries and generations and the native population protected them as fellow citizens, ninety percent of Jews in Belgium were refugees – having sought safety, opportunities and acceptance after World War I.
“There are already 90,000 Jews in Belgium and I can’t allow others in because they will invade and overwhelm us,” declared Minister of Justice Debus de Warnaffe in 1936 – a statement that finds its echoes in fear-of-the-other-based American politics in 2024.
Nonetheless, Belgians Jews were reluctant to respond to German calls for their deportation and Belgian military forces slow-walked their responses to the Nazi orders. In 1942, Belgian burgomasters unanimously refused to distribute the mandated yellow stars Jews were required to wear. In addition, Queen Mother Elzabeth, through the military governor, protested the separation of Jewish families and the deportation of elderly and native-born Belgian Jews. Cardinal Joseph-Ernst van Roey, archbishop of Malines, denounced the “inhuman,” “brutal” and “cruel” treatment of the Jews and, together with Queen Elizabeth saved the lives of a number of leaders of the Belgian Jewish community and delayed the deportation of others.
Queen Elizabeth of Belgium
Remarkably, the underground Front Independence resistance movement published flyers that read “To inform against a Jew is to murder him or her” and threatened the lives of collaborators. Throughout the war, Belgian Jews did more to help their own people than Jews in any other country.
At the same time and because of the greater risk of detection, it was essentially impossible for Jewish families to remain united. Thus, spontaneously established organizations like the Committee for the Defense of the Jews worked to place children in safe – non-Jewish – homes and institutions. Of Belgium’s pre-war 4,000 Jewish children the CDJ – a Jewish arm of the Front Independence – placed – frequently in convents, monasteries and Catholic schools – and saved more than 3,000. When the first international Conference on the Hidden Children was held in NYC in 1991, Belgium – because of the high number of children hidden there – claimed the greatest attendance.
Without the support of the rest of the country – especially through providing false identification papers and food ration stamps, Belgium Jews would not have been able to save themselves. Of the 57,00 Jews who lived in Belgium at the time of the Nazi occupation, 29,000 survived.
In the era of electronic books, the binding on our copy of Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust by Gay Block and Malka Drucker is broken and the pages fall out. But we present some critical and illustrative quotes from their chapter on Belgium.
Mother Germaine Belinne and Daughter Liliane Gaffney
Mother Germaine Belinne and Daughter Liliane Gaffney were rescuers of “hidden children” and acted independently of the Committee for the Defense of Jews.
Germaine: “Today people ask me why I could do this and others couldn’t, and I just don’t know… They were friends, of course, so it felt very natural. I guess people were more afraid that I was…”
Liliane: “The one thing I could never stand as a child is injustice. It always brings out the worst in me. I suppose it’s an inherited trait…”
Germain: “I don’t go to church but every night I pray for the world to be better… You know, something just came back to my mind. This Jewish boy who was in the army and said to me just after the war ‘You know you were stupid. You could have been a millionaire.’ I told him I would never have done it for money.”
Liliane: “My brother, Francis Belinne, became the Number One test pilot in America. He followed Chuck Yeager . It’s funny to remember him playing with neighborhood children of Belgian Nazis in order to avoid suspicion that we were hiding Jews… It frightens us to hear people say it can’t happen in America. So I think children must be raised with careful trust in their hearts. Not blind trust to think that it can’t happen here, because it could, but careful trust… Why do people do things like that and risk their lives? It’s very difficult for a generation raised looking out for Number One to understand it. This is something totally unknown here. But there, if you did not live for others as well as yourself it was not worth living. To be human we need each other….”
Esta Heiber
Esta Heiber was the daughter of a man who trained as a rabbi but “gave all that up and went into business.”
“Both my parents and my eldest sister died in the ghetto, and so did other family members, but others managed to escape to Israel. [Her husband] Maurice and I had a few good years before the war… We decided to join the Resistance… It seemed like the normal thing to do. The time was already very dramatic and something had to be done...”
“What happened was that, little by little, you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t have a radio, you couldn’t go out in the street after dark. Eventually, you couldn’t even be a person, you had to walk with a star. And after a while the star had no purpose because whenever they saw someone with a star they would arrest him and sent him to the barracks. That’s the way it was…”
“Until the war I wasn’t interested in politics at all. During the war everybody was concerned. Someone had to do it because a lot of Jews were hiding, so someone had to try to save the children. It was just life. It was natural. It wasn’t because I wanted to do it; it just happened. I had to do it. I never could have imagined it or foreseen it.
Andree Geulen in Brussels during the German Occupation
Andree Geulen Herscovici was reared in a liberal, bourgeois Catholic family with a social conscience. She joined the Committee for the Defense of the Jews and volunteered to help save Jewish children by taking them from their families, a violence she did not fully understand until she had children of her own. After the war, she married a Jew and became a social worker. “Today I am more Jewish than he is,” she told the authors.
Pages of Andree Geulen’s notebooks listing children under her care
“It’s terrible to hear how a five-year-old child felt when I told her, ‘Your name is not Sarah, your name is Suzanne. You’re not Jewish and you never were Jewish, and you never were called Sarah.’ And the child does not understand. She does not know why she cannot use her real name…”
“In 1941, I was teaching school and noticed that children were disappearing from my class. I asked questions and learned they were Jewish children being taken by the Nazis… So right away I knew where I stood, and I agreed do it - [to change her name and identity and serve as a courier, taking Jewish children away from their parents and families and deliver them to save havens]. I think when you feel you’re doing something absolutely necessary, fear is in the background. You don’t really think about it…”
“It’s hard to explain to [my grandchildren] that the war was being waged against children, that trucks would come in the night into neighborhoods and children would be thrown in like animals, that we had to take them away from their homes to save them….”
Marie Touquet
Marie Taquet and the authors’ interpreter David Inowlocki, a “hidden child” whom she helped save. She was married to as military officer and was named headmistress as the Castle of Jamoigne, a school for boys whose fathers were in the military.
Castle of Jamoigne, a school for boys whose fathers were in the military
Marie: “I was brought up in such an old-fashioned way that I never thought I could work. I just didn’t think I had the character. The first boys came to the castle in 1942, and soon there were eighty boys. Then in March 1943 I was told that another eighty would arrive, and only after they came was I told, ‘They’re Jews, but no one has to know. Will you keep them?’ I said I would. It put the other children in danger because you could tell they were Jewish. We changed their names from David and Yankel to Pierre and Jean…”
David: “I was four and my brother was six when we left home. I remember my mother telling me, ‘David, you have brown eyes. Never let a German see them.’ So whenever I saw a Nazi soldier, I kept my head down… We never went to sleep until she had kissed us. The good boys and the bad boys….”
Names on the Resistance Memorial at the National Monument to the Jewish Martyrs of Belgium.
A New Year’s message to the “otherers”:
To the Islamophobes, the Muslim-haters, the antisemites and “christian (we dropped it capital deliberately) nationalists,”
To those who hide behind balaclavas and seek refuge in the anonymity of violent crowds carrying the flags of long-ago defeated armies of hate,
To the cowards who disseminate messages and hang banners of hate under the cover of night because you fear the light of day,
To those who parade with long guns and camouflage and spew vitriol at children and adults because of their sexual orientation, skin color or land of origin.
We’ll stop speaking and writing about the sins of your ignominious “ideologies,” born of ignorance and fear, when you show the world the embracing courage of these women. And we will pray that God have mercy on you and those whom you love.