Among the Reeds Read online

  Sometimes we wore it, and sometimes we didn’t. It depended on the situation. I often went out without the star, because I could easily pass as a non-Jew. Of course I didn’t have paperwork to back that up, so it was an enormous risk. Genek looked Jewish, and had an accent, making it clear that he was foreign. And he had absolutely no documentation, so if he was stopped and questioned he would be arrested for sure. But Genek was outraged by the star ordinance, and usually refused to wear it. Of course, sometimes he had no choice. Mostly he stayed inside.

  And again I got pregnant. And again I had an abortion. And again the blackness descended upon me and I took to my bed.

  The Anti-Jewish Laws

  Belgium, 1942

  In July 1942 the Ordinance of the Yellow Star was passed – the decree that required all Jews aged six years and up to display a large yellow star with the word “Juif” on their garments. Failure to comply was grounds for execution. This ordinance was so blatant that many non-Jews, most thus far preoccupied with their own troubles, were outraged. The stars were such shocking talismans of the Jews’ marginalization. The AJB, belatedly realizing they were being used to hurt their own people, refused to distribute the stars.

  The non-Jewish populace differed in its reaction to the yellow star ordinance. In Antwerp, as noted, there was a widespread culture of anti-Semitism. In this Flemish city local authorities distributed the stars to the Jewish population and enforced the ordinance.

  In Brussels, situated in the French part of the country, local authorities refused to cooperate, and the Germans had to distribute the stars themselves. In one instance of solidarity, the Cardinal of Brussels, Father Jozef-Ernest Van Roey, said in a sermon, “wearing of distinctive signs shames those who impose it and not those who wear it.”

  The end result was this: Jews were “branded” and ostracized more openly than ever before.

  The French Belgians were among the most supportive in Europe when it came to helping the Jewish people during the war. The Flemish Belgians were much less inclined to help the Jews, and in next-door Holland the Dutch tended to support the Nazi anti-Jewish machine. The French in France, ironically, did not support the Jews for the most part; in that country the Germans easily tapped into the society’s anti-Semitic base. Of course, there were outliers in every country, but these were the general trends. It is hard to make sense of these patterns, but the realization that the local peoples’ attitudes could make such a huge difference in the outcome of the Nazis’ plans is chilling, particularly as so few countries came to the Jews’ aid.

  Hitler and his henchman Eichmann were adept at assessing and manipulating the locals’ attitude toward their Jewish neighbors. In countries like Poland and the Ukraine, where anti-Semitism was rampant, and violence entrenched, the Nazis handily whipped the masses into an anti-Jewish frenzy within days of taking power. In these occupied countries, where young men felt inadequate under foreign rule, the Jews were an easy target. The Germans didn’t even have to do their own dirty work – locals were happy enough to stage pogroms, rounding up Jews for humiliation and torture. In Lvov, for example, a brutal pogrom took four thousand Jewish lives in the first week of German occupation. Later in the war, in Vichy France, a special French police division, the Milice, was formed in this unoccupied, allegedly “free” zone, specifically to hunt for and arrest Jews.

  In Belgium the Germans implemented their anti-Jewish laws more slowly, but by September 1942 they had begun rounding Jews up for deportation. While initially claiming to be transporting these people to work details, the brutality of the roundups, and the inclusion of the elderly and the infirm, children and babies, made the deportations’ sinister conclusions fairly obvious to anyone with the courage to face the truth.

  In fact, the Belgian Resistance movement had sent a young man, Victor Martin, to Germany, as a spy in February of 1943. He was traveling on an academic pretext, but his true mission was to find out the fate of the thousands of Jews being transported by cattle cars to the east. He returned with the news “people are being burned.” This first-hand information about mass extermination in German death camps confirmed the fears that those who were deported would not be coming back. His sinister report contributed to many Jews’ decision to hide their children in Belgium. Victor Martin was eventually captured by the Nazis, but managed to escape from two different concentration camps, and to lead a normal life after the war.

  After as many Jews as possible had been captured through mandates for “labor duty,” the Nazis began making impromptu searches in the streets of Brussels. They would cordon off a city block and demand to see everyone’s identification papers. Anyone with suspicious identity, and all Jews, would be arrested and brought to the Gestapo headquarters on Rue Louise for interrogation, torture, and then deportation. When the street raids stopped netting sufficient numbers, the Nazis began raiding Jewish neighborhoods, arresting people in their homes.

  These roundups were terrifying. Gestapo stormtroopers, shouting and wielding guns, screeched into Jewish neighborhoods, pulling people from their homes, sometimes in their night clothes, throwing them into waiting trucks. Resisters were shot. Terrified Jews sometimes managed to throw their children over their backyard fences in an attempt to save them, begging their gentile neighbors for help. Some people killed themselves to avoid being deported. The exact number of suicides will never be known.

  If the German soldiers did not find everyone on their list during the initial raid, they would usually return to the house later for a second sweep – so Jews who had successfully hidden or evaded the roundup and perhaps crept back indoors later were still at tremendous risk. Neighbors or friends who helped a Jew, if caught, would be either shot or sent along with the Jews for deportation.

  The Nazis patrolled the Jewish neighborhoods and made random searches looking for escapees. The amount of energy put into this heinous effort is staggering. Finding and exterminating Jews was a very top priority in every country the Nazis occupied, from France to the Russian border, and from Scandinavia down to Greece, encompassing thousands of square miles of Europe. Hitler was determined to wipe the Jewish nation from the face of the earth.

  The trucks carrying Jews, and other “unsavory” people arrested by the Gestapo, took the prisoners first to an internment camp. The Germans had built a “transit camp,” a way station, for Belgian deportees in the city of Mechelen (Malines in French), located midway between Antwerp and Brussels, the two cities home to most of the Belgian Jews. From Malines, trains full of prisoners, called transports, each carrying a thousand people, left regularly for the killing camps, most to Auschwitz. A total of twenty-eight such trains, each carrying a thousand people, departed Malines with their human cargo between the summers of 1942 and 1944.

  The Nazi commander of the camp at Malines until March 1943 was S.S. Major Phillip Schmitt. Schmitt was given this command by his Gestapo superiors as a reward for his outstanding work as commander of Fort Breendonk, a camp notorious for its poor conditions and brutality. Schmitt ran the Dossin Barracks, which housed the detainees at Malines, with particular harshness, making use of Jewish prisoners and of his vicious German shepherd to help. Prisoners were intimidated, beaten, and harassed mercilessly under Schmitt’s tenure. After arrival at the camp they were “processed,” stripped of their belongings, and forced to endure endless roll calls which entailed standing at attention in the courtyard regardless of the weather. Children were not exempt from these demands.

  Prisoners were kept in overcrowded and terribly unsanitary conditions with scant food until the thousand-person quota was met. Then all thousand people – mostly Jews, some gypsies (Roma) – were loaded onto the waiting train, in cattle cars, and transported to Auschwitz. Almost none of the people deported from Malines survived. Most were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. Some were kept alive for a while and used as slave labor. Most of them died too.

  Hitler viewed Jews as a nation, not as a religious group. In his twisted philosophy, th
e religion someone practiced was irrelevant. Jews could not switch teams by converting. He came up with strict, if arbitrary, criteria about the percentage of “Jewish blood” that defined a person as Jewish. It was not only Orthodox Jews who were targeted. Secular Jews were too, as were people who considered themselves non-Jews, but perhaps had a grandparent who was originally Jewish. Non-Jews married to Jews were treated as Jewish if they remained with their spouses and children.

  Melly

  A Desperate Decision

  It’s hard to talk about what happened next. The summer of 1942, when Bobby was two years old, brought our ability to live like even half-normal people to an end. We Jews were being hunted by the Gestapo, rounded up on the streets, in our homes, roused from our beds, thrown onto trucks and sent away. We watched, aghast, as neighbors were brutally arrested. People we knew disappeared. We understood that being deported by the Nazis meant death. Every day could be our last.

  One day this realization hit extremely close to home. Nathan, Inge, and Mama were living nearby, as I said. A few streets from them lived Mama’s brother, Uncle Herman, with his wife Sally and their little boy Joachim. They had also left Chemnitz before the borders closed, and had relocated to Belgium. Mama and Herman were very close, and she was happy to have her brother so nearby. Her sister Sarah was in Brussels by now too. Some of Mama’s other siblings had managed to get out of Germany before the war, but these were the only two in Belgium.

  Uncle Herman was brilliant – a scientist and a businessman. He had developed some kind of special glue for fixing inner tubes. He had a little workshop in the basement of his apartment, where he worked to repair tires. By now most Jewish businesses had closed, so it was encouraging that Uncle Herman still had his shop. He was busy, and he needed extra help to run the place. Sometimes Mama and Nathan helped out with the business.

  One day when Nathan and Mama were working in the basement atelier, there was a sudden loud pounding at the door. My brother went up and answered the door. The Gestapo. Where is Herman Fischer? they demanded. Nathan, not knowing what to say, pointed upstairs. The Gestapo pounded up to the apartment above. They did not ask Nathan for identification. My brother realized they were in terrible danger. He ran back down to the basement, grabbed Mama, and rushed her out the back door. Luckily his bicycle was right outside. Frantically instructing Mama to get on the handlebars of his bike, he took off as fast as he could, Mama perched perilously on the handlebars. There was a very steep hill right outside the building. Nathan had never been able to ride all the way up this hill without getting off his bicycle. But that day, adrenaline pumping and giving him superhuman strength, he made it to the top, even with carrying Mama on his bike as well. He pedaled them to safety. They got away from there before the Gestapo thought to ask them who they were.

  But my Uncle Herman and his family were not so lucky. They never had a chance. The Gestapo barged into their home, ordered them all onto the waiting trucks, even their little boy Joachim, and drove off with them. They were transported to the camp at Malines and from there “east” into oblivion. We never saw any of them again. Mama was beside herself.

  We realized we could be picked up any day; our chances for survival were dwindling. We had to think about saving Bobby. We had to hide him. I thought I had seen some dark times, but this – planning to give up my child – this was a horror beyond my reckoning.

  Down the street my mother also was in crisis. Inge and Nathan could no longer go to school. Inge was sixteen by now, she had a lot of friends, and one of them, a Christian girl, helped her get a job in a factory called Lustra. The factory made fur vests, and Inge would earn some much-needed money. It was good for Inge to have a job, and to have some kind of structure in her life. But Mama wanted to find a way to hide Nathan. Nathan was her pride and joy, her baby.

  We all knew about the Resistance. There were people, Jews and non-Jews, who were clandestinely fighting the Germans. We heard that there were ways to get help, ways to hide Jewish children.

  Can you comprehend the desperation we were in? Here was our choice: keep our child at home and know that, if we were captured by the Gestapo, as was likely, he would be killed along with us. Maybe we would have to endure seeing him killed before our eyes. Maybe they would torture him and make us watch. Or, we could give him up to strangers, knowing nothing about who would care for him, but hopefully saving his life. If we chose the latter option, it was likely he would grow up without parents, because it didn’t look likely we would make it. The best possible scenario, the one we prayed for, was that the war would end, we would survive, and be reunited with our boy.

  What made this decision even more heartbreaking was Bobby’s young age. He was too little to understand what we were going to do, or why. There was no way to prepare him for what was coming.

  With my brother Nathan, of course, it was easier. At fourteen, he was capable of taking care of himself, of understanding what was going on. He could communicate, he could make decisions. He didn’t even seem like a child, although technically he was one. We knew Nathan could take care of himself.

  But Bobby. Bobby was two. Thinking about giving him up made my entire body shake. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Desperately I vowed that I would survive. I would not allow my child to grow up an orphan. So maybe Bobby saved my life. Because I was so low, so consumed by blackness, that I would likely have given up if I hadn’t had my child to live for.

  I can’t talk about sending Bobby away. Forgive me. All I know is a young blonde woman came to the door. I didn’t know her name. It was too dangerous. She spoke kindly to my child. We told him it was alright to go for a walk with this kind lady, and that everything would be fine. We kissed him and held him and tried not to show him our anguish.

  And then Bobby was gone. I thought I would die. I didn’t know a person could cry that much. At night I would wake up because Genek, the toughest man I have ever known, was sobbing beside me.

  Andree Geulen and the Resistance

  September 1942

  The young Belgian Resistance fighter, working for the Jewish Defense Committee (the Comité de Défense des Juifs, or CDJ), went by the code name “Claude Fournier.” Her charge that cool September day in 1942 was to pick up Alfred Bottner, aged two and a half, and convey him into hiding. She checked her notes. The child's nickname was Bobby. That would do as his code name. Best not to confuse the toddler more than necessary. She dreaded it when the children were this young. It was impossible for them to understand what was going on. She prepared herself for her errand.

  Andree Geulen, a pretty Belgian girl born and raised in Brussels, was nineteen years old when the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940. Although this invasion was hateful and disruptive, Andree was young and preoccupied with the details of her evolving life. And as a gentile, despite the Nazi occupation, she was able to complete her studies. She graduated in 1942 with a teaching degree in elementary-school education.

  Very soon after beginning her first teaching job, to her horror, a few of her little students appeared in school with yellow stars saying “Juif” sewn to their clothes. Until this point she had given little thought to the Jews’ plight. Raised in a liberal family, she had never thought much about religion and was fairly oblivious to the growing marginalization of this population. She was vaguely aware of the Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda and laws, but it wasn’t until this moment that she realized that innocent people, even little children, were being singled out for humiliating discrimination.

  Appalled at this treatment of her young students, Andree decided to do something. Rather than allow some of the children to stand out with their badges of shame, she instructed all the kids in her class to wear aprons over their clothes. The children complied, and these aprons masked the yellow stars sewn onto some of the children’s shirts. In her class there would be no talisman to mark the Jewish children as different from any of the other students.

  Although the wearing of the compulsory stars was bad, worse was soon to
come: soon Jewish children stopped attending school altogether. Perplexed and concerned, Andree, unlike some of her colleagues, started asking questions, even going to her students’ homes to investigate. To her horror she learned that the children had literally disappeared, arrested by the Nazis together with their families and deported to concentration camps. The savagery of this Nazi outrage against fellow Belgian citizens made a huge impression on the young teacher.

  When the Nazis first started rounding up Jews in Belgium in 1940 and 1941 they targeted only foreign-born Jews. The idea was to reassure the local populace that they were only clearing out “foreigners.” Of course, this was a calculated ruse; by 1942 they were rounding up and deporting even Belgian Jewish families. Andree was appalled.

  As the horrific roundups of Jews escalated in the summer of 1942, Andree met members of the secret Resistance movement. Wanting to do something to help save the children, she decided to join the underground effort despite the risks to her personal safety. And the risks were great. The Nazi regime demanded absolute obedience. Anyone arrested for potential sabotage against the Nazis could expect brutal and sadistic retribution. Yet many intrepid souls risked their lives to do whatever they could to undermine the hated regime.

  One of her recruiters was a woman named Ida Sterno. Sterno was part of the CDJ, a small group within the Belgian Resistance devoted to helping Jews. Sterno realized that, with her affinity for kids and her blonde hair and blue eyes, Andree would be a perfect “escort,” a courier to accompany children to safe houses. She was given the code name, “Claude Fournier,” by which all her contacts in the CDJ, as well as the parents of hidden children, would know her.