They'll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich

Epilogue

Epilogue Only recently I learned that the Dossin army barracks in Mechelen were built by Queen Marie-Therese in the 18th century when Belgium and the Netherlands were not yet independent states, but provinces of the Austrian Empire. I suppose that when I was imprisoned there neither my fellow inmates nor I were interested in the history of a place we abhorred.On that September morning of 1944 when the ancient barracks gate swung open, I saw the most beautiful, the most fascinating world of unlimited possibilities. For a while at least. For those streaming out into the streets of Mechelen the sweetness of freedom would soon be laced with a heavy dose of bitterness. The survivors kept waiting for their families and friends who would never return. Those couples who had found each other in captivity married and stayed together for life. Dina and Sam, Evi and Arnold, Awret and I, and many more. Evi’s parents and three brothers did not return, neither did Dina’s, nor more than 25,000 others. All the “childless” couples among the slave labor force were reunited with their offspring, most of whom had been hiding with Belgian families in the countryside . In many cases the children had been raised as Catholics and had to be coaxed back to Judaism. Maurice and Esta Heiber, true to form, adopted a teen-age girl whom they had befriended in the camp and they put her through college. Not everyone was lucky. When a former inmate met Tilly Sachs and remarked on her protruding belly, she said mockingly that she was going to have a baby. A few weeks later she succumbed to cancer. In his absence, Napoléon’s job at the slaughterhouse was apparently taken by someone else. One day Awret met him begging in the street. What became of Major Schmitt,nicknamed the“Butcher of Breendonck ?” The Allies sent him back to Belgium where he was tried and executed.The advancing Allies also captured Kommandant Frank and Max Boden in Holland on their flight to Germany. They were imprisoned in Brussels. About two years later Evi testified at their trial in Antwerp. She told me that when she entered the courtroom the pair bowed almost to the floor. She ignored them. She was not vindictive in her testimony, but simply told the truth as she did at Schmitt’s trial earlier. I gave a deposition only against Dago Meyer, in a judge’s chamber, not in open court. Though a dossier thick as an encyclopaedia was lying on the judge’s desk, ” Meyer was never tried due to a “lack of evidence.” In 1943, the Judenrat opened orphanages and old age homes for people over age 65. My father, born in 1878, just qualified and went to live there,where I found him after my liberation in September 1944. I rented new quarters and he came to live with me. He died in March 1945, just before the end of the war. It was the winter of the desperate attempt by Germany to stage a comeback at the Battle of the Bulge, andV1 andV2 rockets rattled over Brussels,sometimes exploding in my neighborhood. Food was still scarce, and I would have been happy to receive a package with anything edible, rice, sardines or corned beef. Instead I received a letter from Aunt Hanna in California who promised to send me a silver salamander brooch if only I would write back. After the German defeat, the Jewish community’s first task was to open orphanages for the many children left without families. Awret and I decorated a number of walls there — on condition that we use happy themes and bright colors — and this assignment helped us through difficult times. Directly after my liberation I went to re-register at the town hall of my district in Brussels, expecting the registrar to welcome my resurrection . I was told that since the former German occupants had declared the Dossin barracks in Mechelen to be an “ex-territorial zone” I was no longer a resident in good standing. Because I had left Belgium, I was a new, stateless immigrant who was at liberty to travel but would not be readmitted to the country! I did leave. In 1949 Awret and I with our three-year-old daughter shouldered two knap312 I r e n e Aw r e t sacks and left for the...