From left to right:
Sister Marie Amélie, three Jewish girls who were rescued
from the convent, and their mother, Mme. Poler
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Abducted from the
Hands of the Aggressor
The Rescue of Jewish
Children in Belgium
by Dr. Mordecai Paldiel
On 20 May
1943, just before 10:00 p.m., the doorbell of the Très-Saint-Sauveur
convent in Brussels, Belgium rang. Two armed men forced their way in,
shouting “Hands up!” They were followed by several other armed men and
one woman who stormed the convent, cut the phone lines, and ordered
all the nuns to assemble in the Mother Superior’s office. The nuns
were forced to prepare 15 of their wards—Jewish girls who had been
hidden under the guise of Catholic children in need—for a journey. In
under an hour, the abductors had taken the children, locked up the
nuns in the office, and Sister Marie Amélie (Leloup Eugénie)—the
Mother Superior—in an upstairs room. On the way out, to reassure the
children, one of the men whispered a few words in Yiddish.
Who were these
unusual abductors?
In September
1942, Cardinal Van Roey, head of the Belgian Catholic church in Malines/
Mechelen, and the Comité de Défense des Juifs (CDJ), a Jewish
clandestine rescue organization, encouraged the Mother Superior of the
Trés-Saint-Sauveur convent to take 15 Jewish girls into hiding. For
nine months, the girls lived comfortably in the convent, adapting to
their new surroundings and attending Christian religious lessons.
Jewish rescuers (from left
to right): Toby Cymberknopf, Bernard Fenerberg,
and Paul Halter |
On 20 May 1943,
having received information of the Jewish children, the Gestapo raided
the premises. Discovering that three girls were absent, they decided
to return the next morning to collect all the children at once. “It is
not to kill them,” the head Gestapo agent told the Mother Superior
sarcastically, “but to unite them with their families.”
Frantic, Sister
Marie Amélie contacted Miss Jeanne (the wartime pseudonym of Ida
Sterno, a Jewish activist with the CDJ) for help. She also appealed to
Cardinal Van Roey who contacted Elisabeth, the Queen Mother of
Belgium, through one of his aides. Elisabeth intervened but failed to
persuade the German authorities to alter their plans. Throughout that
day, Sister Marie Amélie and her nuns prayed for divine intervention,
while simultaneously preparing the children’s belongings for the
following day’s “departure.” That night just before 10:00 p.m. their
prayers were answered in the form of an unusual abduction.
The leader of
the raiding party was 23-year-old Paul Halter, a Jewish commander in
the Belgian armed resistance. Earlier that day, he had visited his
friend, Toby Cymberknopf. “I found him very upset,” Halter recalls.
“He informed me that our friend, Bernard Fenerberg, had learned about
the Gestapo’s visit to the convent and their intent to return to
collect the children. We realized that we only had a few hours at our
disposal… and thus decided to take it upon ourselves to rescue the
children.”
Halter,
Cymberknopf, and Fenerberg, were joined by fellow-Jew, Jankiel
Parancevitch, as well as Andrée Ermel and Floris Desmedt from the
Belgian resistance. The six waited for dark, knowing the operation had
to take place before the 10:00 p.m. curfew. “We then forced our way in
at gunpoint. We locked up the Mother Superior, ripped out the phone
line, and tied the nuns to chairs in the convent’s office,” says
Halter.
Half an hour
after the “kidnapping” one of the nuns managed to reach the window and
alert a passer-by who called the Belgian police. The nuns told the
police of the kidnapping and the police carried out their
investigation until the next morning, before alerting the Gestapo
(giving the kidnappers time to escape with the children).
When the
Gestapo appeared at the convent the next morning at 11:00 a.m. the
children were long gone. From the convent, some had been handed over
to their parents, four were brought to Halter’s home, and others were
taken to Cymberknopf’s house. That morning, they had all been transferred to safe locations with help from the CDJ. The Gestapo interrogated
the Mother Superior, who said she was certain the men had been sent by
the Gestapo.
“Did they have
a Jewish appearance?”
“No, not at
all.”
“Were they all
armed?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you
scream?”
“Scream? We
didn’t dare; they said they would shoot if we shouted.”
Unable to
disprove the nuns’ story, the Gestapo left and the children were
saved.
Halter was
later arrested and in September 1943 was deported to Auschwitz. Only
after the war did he discover that all 15 girls had survived. Years
later in 1991, as a participant in the first Hidden Children reunion
in New York, he was reunited with several of the girls he saved.
Sister Marie
Amélie, Mother Superior of Très-Saint-Sauveur, was honored by Yad
Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations in 2001, as were Andrée Ermel
and her parents, Marcel and Céline Ermel (with whom one of the
children, Myriam Frydland, was placed). Yad Vashem equally pays
tribute to the CDJ, and the four Jews who participated in this rescue
operation—a unique episode in the annals of the Holocaust in Belgium.
The author
is Director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department
Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
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