Tell No One Who You Are Page 14

  It was two years almost to the day since the first time she had been taken to the little hamlet of Lagrange. It was winter again in Liège and the dirt road that ran from the village to the farm was frozen and covered with icy patches, just as on that day in 1943. When the farm appeared in the distance, Régine felt she was traveling backward in time.

  Pierre and Sylvie were exactly the same, too. Pierre wore a jacket over his shirt and trousers. Sylvie wore a dark skirt almost to the ground. On their feet were the same wooden clogs. In the kitchen the three sat down at the table to some freshly baked bread with jam. Bricks were warming in the oven, just as in the old days, and Tommy, the dog, was asleep on the floor. But other things had changed. Régine had become a young woman. Pierre and Sylvie noticed and remarked on it.

  As Régine looked around the familiar room, she saw something new on the wall near the clock and crucifix. It was a gold-framed certificate with fancy lettering. She went over for a closer look and read the names of Pierre and Sylvie Wathieu and the inscription: pour leur service à la patrie en temps de guerre — for their service to the country in time of war.

  She turned, smiling, to the Wathieus. “Is this because of me?” she asked.

  The couple smiled back. “We’re not heroes,” Pierre said, proud but embarrassed. “We only did what was right.”

  “We are more honored to have you back in our home,” Sylvie added. “This means more to us than any award. You’re our daughter now.”

  Régine did not answer. She did not know how to tell them she would never be a daughter to anyone, except to her own parents.

  The subject of adoption was never discussed openly because in the minds of Pierre and Sylvie, there was nothing to discuss. Régine had returned to them. She would become their adoptive daughter. She would be baptized, sent to catechism lessons and confirmed as a Catholic. Then they would legally adopt her.

  She lay awake that first night, thinking for hours about religion. How could anyone believe there was a god? If God existed, why did He allow the concentration camps to exist? Why did He permit so much horror? She had made a promise to herself that if her father came back, she would believe in God. But he hadn’t come back. No, she decided. She could not believe in God. Not my mother’s God, even less the God of Pierre and Sylvie.

  How could she say this to the Wathieus? They were good people. They loved her. But they would never understand.

  The following Sunday she went to church with them just as she had done when she was Augusta. But after that, she made up excuses not to go. She pleaded menstruation pains when she could.

  Other times, on a Saturday night she developed a painful headache. She would go downstairs into the kitchen on a Sunday morning and announce that she was too sick to have breakfast, and then go back upstairs to bed. When she heard the door close downstairs, she jumped out of bed and looked out the window to see Pierre and Sylvie walking alone along the dirt road toward the village church. Did they believe her?

  Miraculously, her headaches disappeared by Sunday evening. That was when the village held a weekly dance. The hall was decorated with streamers, a band played accordion music, and all week Régine looked forward to being asked to dance.

  She wore her best dress and went with Irene, who was now twenty years old and used to dancing. Pierre and Sylvie took turns serving as chaperons. They sat in chairs along the wall facing the dance floor, and kept watch on the boys who approached Régine. She preferred Pierre as chaperon because he let her stay later at the dances than did Sylvie.

  At such times she did not mind Pierre and Sylvie thinking of her as their daughter. She liked being back with them and helping them in the farmwork, although she no longer had as much time for it. Fela had agreed to her going back to live with the Wathieus on condition she continue her education. The closest secondary school was a two-hour bus trip every day and there was homework to do.

  If only she could go on living with them without being baptized or adopted, but they kept making references to the adoption. Four months had passed since she had returned to the farm and she did not think she could stall much longer.

  On March 16, 1946, she had her fourteenth birthday. A few days later she was looking out the window and she saw Irene ride up on her bicycle. Irene came in out of breath, almost too excited to speak. The Wathieus had no phone and had arranged for Irene’s parents to take urgent messages. Irene now had such a message. A woman had called from Brussels trying to reach Régine.

  “She wants you to call her back as soon as possible,” Irene said. “It’s something about your family.”

  Régine and Sylvie hurried to the house at the end of the village to make the return call. The phone rang twice, then three times. Finally Fela’s voice came crackling over the wire. At first Régine did not understand and Fela had to repeat the news: Oncle Shlomo had been found.

  It was not clear who had found whom, but that hardly mattered. Just as Régine had given the International Red Cross her uncle’s name, he had done the same in England in the hope of locating members of his sister’s family.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  RÉGINE SAT AT THE FRONT of the airplane. She was nervous and unable to eat the food brought by the stewardess. She sat upright, unable to relax. It was her second trip over water, but her first time on an airplane.

  She reached under the seat and pulled out her duffel bag. She had packed her most prized possessions: the mortar and pestle, her copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the photographs. She looked through the photographs again. Would she ever know exactly what happened to Léon? To her mother? To her father? Slowly during the last months she had been at the Wathieus’ she had come to accept that none of them might return. Information of what went on in the German concentration camps was coming out, horrible and unbelievable, but forcing acknowledgment.

  She was looking for something else, and now she found it — a small autograph book.

  She put the duffel bag away and opened the book to the first page and read the entry:

  Never forget

  that life is a daily struggle.

  Never give in to despair.

  Disappointments that we may have

  teach us better to deal with life.

  Faith in a better world

  is a great force for Man and his endeavors.

  Don’t take to heart the momentary failures

  As long as you are certain of reaching your goal.

  Fela

  Edgar

  Régine smiled, thinking how fat Fela had become, until Fela explained laughing that she and Edgar were going to have a baby.

  The three of them had hugged and kissed on the tarmac and promised to keep in touch. Her last sight of them through the porthole had been comforting. They looked so happy together. They will always be my friends, she thought. They bring me closer to my father.

  She had sobbed quietly to be leaving them as the plane moved off, taking her to an unknown country.

  Pierre and Sylvie had also cried when she left them. Despite their differences, they too would remain friends for life. Régine promised to visit them every time she went back to Belgium. She would never forget all they had done for her.

  When Fela’s phone call came, they knew immediately what it meant: this time they had really lost their little girl. They also understood it was right that Régine should leave, even though her father had not been found.

  “You will be with your family,” Pierre said. “That’s where you belong.”

  Although Régine was sad to be leaving Pierre and Sylvie, she was also enormously relieved not to have been baptized a Catholic. Her family had suffered and died because they were Jewish. She must not forsake their memory.

  Régine stayed again at Les Hirondelles while she went about collecting all the necessary papers for her departure. The Joint Distribution Committee, an aid organization, gave her money to buy a suitcase for her trip. She was relieved to find that la directrice had been replaced by someone else, who did n
ot say “n’est-ce pas?” all the time. Rosa was still staying there, too, and she and Régine went to the photography studio together to have a souvenir picture taken of themselves.

  When she visited the Saktregers to say good-bye to them as well, she learned that Léon hoped to go to England to study and maybe stay there. Régine hoped so; it would be nice to have someone from her childhood there.

  Régine felt much anxiety about going to live in England. When she last saw Oncle Shlomo, she had only been four years old. Whatever she knew about him she had learned from the many stories her mother used to tell. Fela had been reassuring. Régine would be in her own family, she reminded her, and they would send her to school. She could speak Yiddish with them until she mastered English. Yiddish was the language Régine had spoken with her mother, and by now she had almost forgotten it.

  Régine looked out of the window of the airplane. Clouds blocked her vision of what lay below. She settled back in her seat, but her back felt rigid, and she was still unable to relax. She flipped the page of her autograph book and read the second inscription.

  April 12, 1946

  To our daughter Régine,

  You are leaving us, dear Régine, taking with you the undying affection of your adoptive parents and leaving behind you enormous regrets. May our best wishes accompany you over there. Be happy and keep with you an everlasting souvenir of us. Do not forget us. We will always remember our dear daughter Régine brightening our home with her beautiful youth.

  With the fervent hope that each year will bring you back to us, dear Régine, this comes with our most tender kisses.

  Pierre & Sylvie.

  Régine noticed something now that she had not seen before, something surprising. It was not so much that Pierre and Sylvie called her their daughter and thought of themselves as her adoptive parents. What surprised her was that they had written “Régine” in her book. This was new, and at first it came as a shock. To Pierre and Sylvie, she had always been Augusta Dubois, right up to their last good-bye. But now, she saw, they accepted that Augusta was gone from their lives and had been replaced by Régine.

  The propeller plane hit an air pocket and made a sudden drop. Régine caught her breath, frightened, until the plane evened itself. She looked out the window again. The clouds had opened and she could see the dark water below. They were crossing over the English Channel. She smiled, realizing what day it was: April 15, 1946, the eve of Passover.

  Afterword

  IN ENGLAND, Régine lived with her uncle, learned English, finished secondary school, took a secretarial course and went to work.

  At the age of eighteen, she married Peretz Zylberberg, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. “I wanted to start a family of my own as soon as possible,” she says. A son, Philip, was born in 1952 and a daughter, Sonia, in 1954.

  Léon Saktreger who had also immigrated to England remained a close friend. “I saw him and his wife often. He became my surrogate brother.” Régine also kept in touch with her friends in Belgium, returning there every holiday. She brought her son Philip to visit the Wathieus and Fela Herman and then, before immigrating to Canada in 1958, she brought both her son and daughter to say good-bye to them.

  Through the years, Régine continued to hang onto hope that somehow somewhere her father or brother had survived — even after the Memorial National des Martyrs Juifs erected in Brussels in 1970 listed their names among the 23,880 Jews from Belgium who did not return from the death camps. In 1972 she went to Israel, a present she made herself for her fortieth birthday. She did not believe in God, but she wrote a note and inserted it into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for a miracle. In 1979 another monument was added to the National Memorial in Brussels, this one listed her father among the 242 Jewish heroes who had taken part in acts of resistance to the Nazi occupation and died.

  It was not until 1982 that she was forced to abandon all hope. That year German SS files were published with the names of Jews from Belgium who had passed through the Malines deportation center near Brussels, the number of the convoy that took them to Auschwitz and the number assigned each victim. There she found the names and numbers of her father, her brother, her Aunt Ida and Uncle Zigmund — and her mother.

  Seeing her mother’s name with a number beside it brought a new shock of horror. Because her mother had been so ill, Régine had thought death might have come mercifully to her as soon as she was arrested — before being thrown onto trucks and trains, before her arrival at Auschwitz, before being put into the selection line that sent those unable to work directly to the gas chambers. “I cried more for my mother,” she says, “than for any of the others.”

  Another pain of not-knowing that Régine had carried with her through the years was relieved two years later.

  It concerned Madame Sadowski’s account of her parents’ arrest. Régine had refused to believe that her father could have allowed her mother to be arrested while he hid in the coal closet. But what exactly had occurred when the Gestapo came to 73 rue Van Lint?

  In 1984, on a visit back from Canada to England, she was spending an evening with Léon Saktreger and his wife. He was nearly sixty years old at that time. After dinner, Léon handed her a dozen typewritten sheets, explaining: “I felt I should write down what happened to my family and our friends during the war, just so my children and grandchildren might know. I mention your parents in it, so I thought you might like a copy.”

  Régine tore the papers from his hand and rushed through them to find the part about her parents. She read it, then looked at Léon with astonishment. “Why did you never tell me all this?” she asked. “All these years, you knew this and you never told me?”

  “I thought you knew,” he answered, flustered. “If you had asked …”

  “Tell me now, everything.”

  Léon started slowly. “After your brother was sent to France, my parents were afraid I’d be picked up next. They made plans for where I would hide. Then came the raids at Antwerp in the middle of August where whole families were taken, and my parents arranged hiding places for themselves as well. Solidarité was telling everyone to try to escape or hide. Your father was telling everyone. But he could not hide himself.”

  Léon seemed uncertain how to continue. “You did know that your mother had cancer, had been operated on and was sent home from the hospital to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was no way she could run and hide and your father was not going to leave her. Your mother was sure she would not be arrested. Why would the Gestapo want a dying woman? She even had a certificate from the surgeon at the hospital stating that under no circumstances should she be moved and she was sure that would save her. It was your father who was in danger.

  “My mother was there nearly every day and they told her their plan. If the Gestapo came, your father would hide in the coal closet in the hall and your mother would lock him in with a heavy padlock on the outside of the door. Your mother felt she could walk the short distance to lock him in and let him out afterwards. The Gestapo would not bother to break it open and look inside. Why would anyone be in a closet with a lock outside?

  “It was an ingenious scheme,” Léon paused. “But your parents underestimated the Gestapo. They took your dying mother from her bed. The next day they came back. We think the new tenant upstairs informed the Gestapo. They found your father, banging on the closet door, trying to get out.”

  Léon spoke slowly as he completed the account. “At what point your father realized your mother was not coming to let him out, whether he thought she had become too terrorized from the raid to move, whether he knew she had been arrested, we’ll never know.”

  That was all Régine was able to learn about the disappearance of her family in the Holocaust.

  In 1991, she attended the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II. More than 1,600 from twenty-eight countries came to New York City for the meetings.

  Afterwards, Régine commented:
“Many were babies and too young to remember their parents when they were in hiding. I felt sorry for them. I had my memories.”

  Appendices

  Belgium and the Jews

  Belgium is justly proud of its record in trying to protect Jews from deportation to the Nazi concentration camps during the occupation of that country by the Germans.

  Of the more than 60,000 Jews living there at the outbreak of World War II, more than half survived because of the assistance given by the Belgian people and their institutions in assisting escapes or, more often, in providing hiding places.

  Jewish children hid in Belgium

  More than 4,000 Jewish children were hidden in institutions and private homes. The sixty-five schools, convents, orphanages, creches, camps and hospitals that provided this shelter knew the origin of the children they were taking in and the danger of being found out by the Gestapo. Hundreds of private families also gave shelter to one or two Jewish children, some knowingly, most unknowingly. Jewish children were mixed in with non-Jewish children by Belgian organizations providing “country stays” for city children.

  Solidarité Juive

  Solidarité was one of several communist organizations in Belgium at the time of the outbreak of World War II. The Communist Party was outlawed and non-citizens were forbidden to participate in political activity of any nature but many Jews from eastern Europe were communists and believed that communism would end the racial and religious prejudice that seemed endemic in that part of the world. Because organizations like Solidarité and Secours Mutuel, a leftist Zionist organisation, operated on a personal level in small groups in private homes, publishing and distributing underground newspapers, they were immediately effective in proposing opposition to the Nazis, advising Jews not to register, not to answer call-ups, warning them of impending raids, and recommending they go into hiding.