Description
Book SynopsisThe role of Christians who collaborated with the Jewish underground to assure Jews’ survival begs for greater attention. Their informal cooperation emerges as a key element in Holocaust Survival in Antwerp: On Foreign Soil, a memoir of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, translated and with an introduction by Jeffrey Kleiman. Alter Kleiman fled Polish antisemitism in 1926 and settled in Antwerp. By 1942, life under German rule became unsustainable, so he fled the city and found refuge in the Belgian region of Wallonia where the industrial city of Charleroi offered protection. There, he shared the basement apartment in a boarding house. In this memoir, Kleiman recounts how, despite his fears of betrayal, Christians not only sheltered him but helped him further by directing members of the Jewish underground to this apartment, who were then able to provide cash and food coupons.
Table of Contents1 Hiding in a Hole
2 Belgium and Poland
3 The Years 1937 and 1938
4 The Flood of Jewish Immigrants to Belgium
5 Zalman Rubashov Warns the Jews in Belgium
6 The Germans Attack Belgium
7 Back in Antwerp
8 America Takes Part in the War
9 The Yellow Patch and Other Troubles
10 The Jewish Race in Charleroi
11 Whether or not to obey a Summons
12 In the Camp
13 The Murderous Hunger
14 Escape — The Only Way Out
15 The Prayer
16 The Test Landing at Dieppe
17 My Plan to Return Home
18 Antwerp: A Cemetery for the Jews
19 They Took Away My Wife and Child
20 Charleroi, a “Garden of Eden”
21 The Tomb at Marc’s
22 Jewish Neighbors
23 In the Tomb it becomes Tight and Dangerous
24 The Risky Trip Back to Antwerp
25 Hunger and First Contact with the Underground Movement
26 The Belgians Awaken
27 The Pains from a Toothache
28 Germans, Get Out!
29 Hopes and Troubles
30 Jewish Persecution—the Last “Heroism” of the Germans
31 Shadows from the World
32 A Catholic Priest Who Rescued Jews and Cared for the Children with Yiddishkeit
33 Life Must Go On[Sept./ Oct. 1944]
34 A Priest Makes a Sermon for Musaf (A Yom Kippur Prayer)
35 The Last Gasp of Hitler’s Army
