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

Foreword

Foreword As the chronicler of the generation which Irene Awret belongs to, I think I have read more stories of survivors, published and unpublished, than most. I still find every one of absorbing interest because no two stories are alike.The first part of Irene Awret’s account of her youth is only too familiar to me personally — the German Jewish background, middle class life in Berlin, family, school, youth movement. I was born the same year as she, I belonged to the same youth group, the Werkleute, and I write these lines at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin Grunewald, some five minutes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Mrs. Awret grew up. The songs and poems she mentions are familiar to me as well, as is the whole atmosphere in which we then lived, witnessing the transition from Weimar to the Third Reich. The lakes and the trees in Berlin have changed little nor the main roads and the Grunewald railway station from which the deportations of the Berlin Jews took place is still there with a drug store and a newspaper kiosk in front. From time to time classes of school children turn up to see this place as part of their curriculum in the field of civics. There is nothing very exciting to be seen in UncleTom’s Cabin except the temporary buildings of the post-war U.S. occupation administration , now largely empty. It must be very difficult for these school children born ten or fifteen years ago even to begin to understand what happened there once upon a time and Mrs.Awret’s recollections could add to their understanding. She and her family waited too long with their emigration — not without reason, for there was nowhere to go. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, they were taken by smugglers over the so-called “green border” and ended up in Brussels. But like thousands of other German Jews they had not escaped far enough because in late spring x of 1940, the Nazi armies invaded Holland and Belgium. For the next three years Irene Awret survived in the Belgium capital much of the time with false identity papers, in dire poverty but still persisting in pursuing her drawing and painting classes at least part of the time. Unlike the great majority of Dutch Jews, who were rounded up, deported and perished, a considerably higher proportion of Belgian Jews survived. One does not have to look very far for an explanation — some 90 percent or more were recent arrivals, mainly from Poland, whereas most Dutch Jews were quite assimilated, their families having settled in the country generations earlier.This meant that Dutch Jews behaved like good citizens obeying without questioning the order of the authorities, whereas the East European Jews in Belgium had the traditional (and quite justified) distrust of authority which they had brought from their countries of origin. It is also true that Belgium (in contrast to Holland) had a German military administration to carry out the Nazi instructions for eliminating the Jews; but the local army officers had other priorities and did not overexert themselves in this respect. In both countries help was extended to the Jews and thousands of children were hidden, though there was also a good deal of collaboration, spying and informing, with the occupying forces and there were sizeable Nazi movements in both countries. Those who survived owe their life largely to accident and luck.Mrs. Awret’s arrest by the Gestapo came in 1943 after the mass deportations in the summer of 1942 had already taken place. The newly arrested were taken to concentration camps that served as transit stations for deportation to the gas chambers in Poland. A great deal has been written aboutWesterbork, the Dutch camp, but little if anything about Mechelen (Malines in French), the Belgian transit camp, formerly a military installation. Irene Awret’s account with her drawings and oil paintings are a unique contribution to one of the chapters in the story of these dark years. Mechelen is located not far from Brussels — it is known today mainly for its soccer club, its medieval buildings its cathedral (it is the seat of the primate of the Catholic church in Belgium) and the site of xi various festivals. But there is also a museum in remembrance of deportations and resistance. In this camp in which Irene Spicker met her future husband Azriel...