The "Belgian Schindler" Pt 1.
In the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, a remarkable true story of rescue involving a Belgian baron and a Jewish family of eight from Antwerp.
Miriam Gluzman rests the thick leather photo album on her lap and motions for me to move closer. Decorated with an image of a Spanish schooner, the album is bulging with photographs documenting Miriam’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Belgium and Argentina, where she emigrated with her family in 1948. Miriam acquired the album in the early 1950s when she was living in Buenos Aires – hence the nautical Hispanic theme - but she long ago ran out of pages and, as she leafs through the album loose photographs slip between the covers.
I am expecting to see a photograph of her sister, Celia, who remained in Buenos Aires after the war, or her oldest sister Bella, who emigrated to Israel. Instead, I am astonished to see one of the sleeves contains a swatch of bright yellow fabric with a bold black hexagram. At the centre, picked out in sharp italic, is a single letter ‘J’. Although the fabric is frayed around the edges, there is no mistaking the Nazi artefact: the Star of David with the ‘J’ for Jew looks as fresh as the day it was stitched.
“How it came into my possession, I don't know,’” Miriam tells me. “Bella insists we never wore it, but Celia says we did. Bella and I had an argument about it. How come I have one then, I asked?”
That is a question that neither Miriam or Bella has been able to answer. Like Celia, the sisters survived the war by posing as Catholics and living under assumed names at convents, orphanages and safe houses in different parts of Belgium. Remarkably, their sister Sophie and brothers, Israel and Akiva (known as Isy and Kiva), also survived the war, as did their parents, Moshe and Esther Lachman. That they did so was largely down to their father's refusal to submit to the Nazi’s anti-Jewish measures and wear the hated yellow patch. As Bella put it when I reached her by Skype one afternoon at her home near Jerusalem: “My father reasoned that if we wore the star it would be easy for the Germans to pick us up. Rather than go with the herd he decided to go the other way.”
Moshe’s instinct for survival led him to uproot his family from their home in Antwerp at the heart of the city's 20,000-strong Jewish community and decamp to Brussels where no one knew them and, he reasoned, they would have a better chance of evading the Gestapo. So it was that in June 1942, shortly after Adolf Eichmann's Reich Security Office issued a decree requiring Jews to wear the Star of David, the Lachmans fled Antwerp. To keep one step ahead of the authorities they switched apartments every few months, keeping eight duffel bags packed and ready in the hallway at all times. Then, in the autumn of 1942, as the Nazis stepped up deportations to the east, Moshe made a momentous decision.
“He called me, Isy and Kiva to one side and explained that he could no longer take responsibility for us and that if we split up we would have a better chance of surviving,” explains Bella. “As I was a girl and there was less chance that I would be stopped in the street and exposed as a Jew, I was the first to go.”
Aged just 16, Bella boarded a train at Antwerp Central Station and rode it to the end of the line. She was alone and spoke no French but with the help of a sympathetic priest she found a position as a nanny with a Dutch family. However, the family had six children and the work was hard and after three months Bella was fed up. It was at this point that Bella had a stroke of luck that would lead to an introduction to a Belgian baron, Henri de Broqueville. That introduction would prove to be her and her family’s salvation.
Bella met De Broqueville via a childhood friend who was active in the Belgian-Jewish resistance. The nephew of Belgian's former First World War prime minister, Charles de Broqueville, Henri was from a well-connected aristocratic family with an ethos of public service. More importantly, shortly after German troops had marched into Belgium in May 1940, he had been recruited by his uncle to front a Jewish-owned pharmaceutical company to prevent the asset from falling into the hands of the Nazis. The result was that when he heard about Bella's plight he immediately offered her a position in his home in Brussels looking after his children, Eric and Cynthia. To conceal Bella’s Jewish identity, he also provided her with false papers and a French alias, ‘Bertha Blackman’. Later, De Broqueville would go further, supplying false passports for Bella's brothers, Isy and Akiva, so the Jewish underground could smuggle them to Switzerland, and – when it became too dangerous for Bella’s parents to remain in Brussels – relocating them to a safe house near his country estate in Wezembeek.
‘The Baron was a kind man, a righteous man,’ Bella tells me. ‘If it wasn't for him there is a very good chance none of us would have survived the Holocaust.’
I first heard the story of the “Belgian Schindler” one Sunday evening in 2012 when the phone rang unexpectedly at my London home. The caller was an old journalistic contact, Nathan Dony. Though I had not spoken to him for several years, I was not surprised. Nathan always called on Sundays on the assumption, I suppose, that it was the end of the Shabbat and that, like him, I would be at home with my family with nothing better to do than to listen to his stories.
An incorrigible joker, Nathan has a wisecrack for every occasion. In another life he would have been a standup comedian in the Catskills. Instead, he built a successful career as a forensic accountant in London, where he excelled at the exposure of corporate fraudsters and financial slights of hand (he has a famous story about facing down lawyers representing Mohammed Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods). On this occasion, however, Nathan wasn't calling to boast about his latest corporate scalp but to tell me about his long-lost Belgian cousins. A few months earlier, he explained, his brother, Henry, had visited Israel and been re-united with Bella. In the course of the re-union Bella had told them the outline of the above story: how in 1942 she had introduced her father, Moshe – Nathan's mother's uncle – to Henri de Broqueville and how, with the baron’s help, they had survived the Holocaust and been reunited at war's end.
“It's a wonderful story,” said Nathan. “Imagine, all eight members of the family survived. No one was captured or deported!”
I had to agree that, on the face of it, the story did appear remarkable, a rare piece of ‘good news’ amidst the horror of the Holocaust. But it wasn't until I spoke to Miriam that I realised just how remarkable. De Broqueville was not the only Belgian come to the Lachman’s aid. Other ‘righteous’ gentiles included a Catholic priest, Father Joseph André; his associate, a young partisan activist named Hubert; and two teachers at a boarding school in Namur who sheltered Miriam, Celia, and 25 other Jewish girls for the last two years of the war.
Moreover, while the survival of all eight members of a single family was unusual, the Lachmans were not the only Belgian Jews to avoid being deported to the death camps. In all, it is estimated some 25,000 Belgian Jews were sheltered in monasteries, nunneries, convents, orphanages and private dwellings. These ‘rescue’ efforts were rarely the work of lone individuals but usually involved networks of people – priests and nuns, financiers and bureaucrats, partisans and the Jewish underground – working in concert. The result was that while in Holland, 70 percent of the country’s 140,000-strong Jewish population was deported to ‘resettlement’ camps in the east, in Belgium only 45 percent of Belgian Jewry – or approximately 26,000 adults and children – were deported. Though estimates vary, it is believed that in total some 30,000 Belgian Jews survived the Holocaust. These figures are all the more remarkable when you consider that over 90 percent of the Jews living in Belgian at the time of the Nazi invasion were not Belgian citizens but economic migrants who spoke little French or Flemish.
What explains the relatively high survival rate of Belgian Jews? And what was it about Belgium’s society and culture that made citizens from a wide range of social classes and religious backgrounds willing to risk their lives for these Yiddish‐speaking foreigners? Furthermore, why, when the war was over, were these stories of compassion, resistance and rescue so quickly forgotten?
to be continued tomorrow…
This is the first of a three-part post telling the remarkable true story of Baron Henri de Broqueville and the Lachmans of Antwerp. Please note, parts two and three are for paying subscribers only.