Belgium had around 65,000 Jews at the start of the German occupation in May 1940. Around 25,000 of them were murdered in the Holocaust, most deported through the transit camp at Mechelen to Auschwitz. Belgium’s Jewish mortality rate of around 40 per cent is one of the lower figures in occupied Western Europe, well below the 75 per cent mortality of the Netherlands and below France. The reason was a combination of an obstructive Belgian civil service, a willing Catholic and Protestant population that sheltered Jews in numbers, an effective Jewish underground, and one of the most extraordinary single resistance acts of the Holocaust: the attack on Convoy XX in April 1943.
The community
Belgian Jewry was overwhelmingly an immigrant community. Around 90 per cent of the 65,000 Jews in Belgium in 1940 were not Belgian citizens. Most were recent arrivals: Polish and Lithuanian Jews who had fled inter-war antisemitism, German Jews who had fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s. The community was concentrated in Antwerp and Brussels, with smaller numbers in Liege and Charleroi. The Antwerp Jewish community ran the diamond trade. Brussels had a more diverse community, with garment workers, professionals, intellectuals and refugee artists.
The German occupation
Germany invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940 and the country surrendered eighteen days later. The German occupation authority, under General Alexander von Falkenhausen, was a military administration rather than a civilian Reich Commissioner, and was somewhat less aggressive than the equivalent administrations in occupied France and the Netherlands. Anti-Jewish measures came progressively from October 1940: registration, the yellow star (introduced in May 1942), exclusion from the professions, confiscation of property.
The Belgian civil service obstructed the German measures where it could. The Belgian Secretaries-General, the senior civil servants left in office after the government had fled to London, refused on several occasions to put their signatures to anti-Jewish decrees. The Brussels city authorities refused to distribute yellow stars in the city. The Belgian magistracy refused to sit in cases brought against Jews under the German measures. The pattern of obstruction was consistent enough that the Germans eventually bypassed the Belgian administration and dealt directly with the Belgian Jewish leadership.
The deportations
The deportations from Belgium began in August 1942 from the Mechelen transit camp, in a former military barracks halfway between Antwerp and Brussels. Trains ran every few weeks to Auschwitz. The Antwerp Jewish community was the most exposed: the Antwerp city police cooperated with the round-ups in a way the Brussels police did not. The Antwerp Jewish community lost a higher proportion of its number than the Brussels community.
The attack on Convoy XX
On 19 April 1943, three young members of the Belgian resistance, Youra Livchitz, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, attacked a deportation train as it left Mechelen for Auschwitz. They had a single pistol, a hurricane lamp covered in red paper to mimic a railway danger signal, and a pair of wire cutters. Livchitz stood on the line waving the lamp. The train stopped. Maistriau ran along the wagons cutting the bolts on the doors and shouting at the people inside to run. Around 231 Jews escaped from the train. About 115 reached safety, mostly through Belgian resistance networks that hid them or moved them across the Swiss border.
The attack on Convoy XX was the only successful attack on a Holocaust deportation train. It is also one of the few cases in the Holocaust record where direct intervention by armed civilians on a deportation route saved lives at scale. Livchitz was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and shot in early 1944. Maistriau survived the war. Franklemon was deported to Sachsenhausen but survived. The convoy itself continued to Auschwitz with the prisoners who had not been able to escape.
The hidden children
Around 4,000 Belgian Jewish children were hidden in Catholic and Protestant institutions, with non-Jewish families, and on remote farms during the occupation. The Comite de Defense des Juifs, the underground Jewish defence committee, organised much of the placement work. The Belgian Catholic Church cooperated extensively, with Cardinal van Roey of Mechelen authorising the use of religious institutions to shelter Jewish children. The post-war reunion of hidden children with surviving parents, where any parents survived, was a slow and difficult process. Many of the hidden children remained with their wartime foster families. Several of the most prominent post-war Belgian Jewish writers and academics were former hidden children.
The post-war record
Belgium prosecuted around 50 senior collaborators after the war, including the local SS commanders responsible for the deportations. The Belgian state acknowledged its institutional failures during the war in formal apologies in the 2000s. The Mechelen transit camp building, restored, is now the Kazerne Dossin Holocaust memorial museum. The Belgian Jewish community today numbers around 30,000, with Antwerp particularly recovering as a major centre of Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish life and the diamond trade.
See also
Sources
- Maxime Steinberg, L’etoile et le fusil, Vie Ouvriere, 1983
- Dan Michman (ed), Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans, Yad Vashem, 1998
- Marion Schreiber, The Twentieth Train: The True Story of the Ambush of the Death Train to Auschwitz, Atlantic, 2003
- USHMM: Belgium