The Belgian Schindler Pt 2.
The remarkable true story of Henri de Broqueville and the Lachmans of Antwerp – or how a Belgian baron helped a Jewish family of eight escape the Holocaust.
In yesterday’s post, I told how, in 1942, a Belgian baron, Henri de Broqueville, helped eight members of a Jewish family evade the Nazis and avoid deportation to the German death camps. In this, the second installment of a three-part post, I pick up the story of the the three youngest members of the Lachman family, Miriam, Celia and Sophie.
Miriam, or Mina as she is known in Yiddish, was just four when the Second World war broke out and is the first to admit that there are many elisions in her memory. To make sense of her early childhood recollections she has spoken to her older sister, Bella.
“Our first apartment in Brussels was on the third floor of an old house near the Gard du Nord,” she says. “The windows were painted white. In my mind I thought it was so that from the street no one would be able to see in, but my sister Bella told me no, it was so the sun would not fade the wallpaper!”
Flicking through her photo album, it becomes clear that the pictures are another aide memoire – “pictures talk, they don’t lie,” she says. As far as Miriam is concerned, the album is a key exhibit – one that has helped her make sense of her family’s remarkable story – and it is no accident that of all the Lachman children she should have been the one to keep it. “I’m a hoarder,’ she confessed when I first met her in the spring of 2012 at her home in Paramus, New Jersey, not far from where Hurricane Sandy would make landfall the following October. “Stamps, coins, flowers – it doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll collect it.”
Miriam turns the page, alighting on a group photograph of her mother, Kiva, and her sisters, Sophie and Celia, standing in front of some woods. Taken in a park near Antwerp during a rare family outing, the picture is undated but Isy looks about 13, and Miriam, who is being held aloft by her mother, looks about one, which would place the photo in 1937.
She turns the page again, pausing this time to show me a picture of Isy and an out-of-focus shot of her parents, also from before the war. Then she comes to a picture of her and Celia standing in the corner of a room with distinctive patterned wallpaper. Aged about six and nine respectively, the sisters, who are smartly dressed and with their hair neatly combed, are holding hands and smiling. If you didn’t know better you would think they hadn’t a care in the world. Miriam believes the picture was taken in 1942 in at the apartment of a Yugoslav woman named Olga in Brussels who took them in when it became too dangerous for them to stay with their parents. The photo provokes a sudden show of anger.
“My sister and I were very unhappy there. Olga didn't have any feelings for children, she kept us only to benefit herself! I remember that one day Bella brought us a bottle of milk. Olga emptied half the bottle into a bowl for her cat and filled the remainder of the bottle with water. My sister was very sad. She couldn't do anything.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Going Viral to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.