In This Hospitable Land (66 page)

Then he gave each of the children another set of kisses.

At least money wasn’t going to be an issue. Upon André’s return to the Free University he was surprised and relieved to discover that what would have been his pay for the last four years had been saved and then given to him in a great lump sum.

The university also gave him the day off to get his affairs in order. He immediately presented himself at the customs office. The agent on the train had been quite right: Jack Freedman’s diamonds were returned speedily with sincere, repeated apologies.

Then he took his money and diamonds to his old bank where the tellers he had known continued to work. Fortunately those tellers had been on duty when the Germans had arrived and had had them open many safes for pilfering, including the safe with the Sauverins’ valuables. The tellers had cleverly told the Germans that the Sauverins’ sterling silver wasn’t truly valuable—that it was only silver-plated, not worth the trouble of carting off.

André was less lucky in Le Coq, where he went to see about the family’s other belongings. Remarkably Juli their maid still lived in the cottage. But André was incensed that she had married a Nazi. Juli professed happiness in seeing André again and learning that Denise and the children were well, but she denied anything in the villa belonged to the Sauverins.

André wasn’t ready to deal with her then. But he warned he would return soon to reclaim everything he could identify—including the bed linen, which he would strip off in front of her face if he had to.

By the time he got back to Brussels it was almost dinnertime. But he still had to go see the relatives.

André climbed the stairs to his new apartment with Anna Sauverin following slowly. She longed to see her family and was especially anxious to discover for herself how much Ida and Christel had grown. She had never even seen a picture of Cristian.

Finally Anna stood at the threshold, tears filling her eyes and obscuring her vision. The children weren’t there just then, but Denise took her by the hand, gave her a gentle insistent hug, and said, “It’s good to see you again.”

Looking up into Denise’s sweet face, Anna burst out crying and leaned her head against her chest. She felt distraught, bitter, angry, torn to pieces, lost in her memories.

Right behind, supporting her, André took her shoulders in his hands. When Denise looked around at him, he appeared somber and pale. His gray-green eyes seemed sunken into his head.

“What is it?” Denise asked, sensing something terribly wrong.

Anna could not let Denise go nor speak. The recitation had to be left to André.

“They took the girls,” he said simply but thickly.

Denise gasped and clutched a hand to her chest. “The Germans?”

“In 1941. The Gestapo rounded up almost all the Jews. Male and female.”

“They only left old women like me,” Anna wailed. “Took all the rest!”

Denise gently led Anna to the easy chair. Anna tried to catch her breath but that was hard to do between sobs.

Persistently questioned, Anna tried to clarify what had happened to the Jews in Belgium. When the Nazis had come to look for them initially they had been nearly impossible to identify since public records revealed nothing and few citizens of any persuasion wanted to assist the Nazis, particularly since so many still had terrible memories of the occupation during the Great War. Encouraged by the Belgian government-in-exile in London and by the Catholic Church at home, many did what they could to help the Jews. Christian families took in and hid Jewish children at great risk to their own safety. An active Resistance emerged with both Jewish and non-Jewish participants. The Committee for Jewish Defense published and distributed informational pamphlets and propaganda materials and did everything from sequestering Jews to fighting as partisans, forging identification papers and ration coupons, raising money, and establishing escape routes and networks.

All together these efforts had kept down the death toll but ultimately could not fend off the Nazis and their collaborators. Of the nearly hundred thousand Jews living in Belgium when the war began, some seventy thousand had been deported and more than twenty-five thousand had been killed outright.

“Some say government officials were complicit,” André fretted. “I don’t see how so many Belgian Jews could have been killed if that wasn’t true.”

Fewer than five thousand Jews continued to live in Belgium. Anna was one.

“But I don’t understand why they came for the girls,” Denise said miserably. “Were they members of the Resistance?”

“No!” Anna keened.

“None of our family participated in Resistance activities…in Belgium,” André said softly.

“There was no reason to take anyone!” Anna howled. “Except that they were Jews!”

Denise knelt beside Anna, took her hands, and asked, “Why didn’t they take you?”

“They did!” Anna shrieked. “I was already on the truck with my poor girls. My babies!”

André explained, “Our queen intervened. She had little power but demanded that women over sixty-five be spared. Anna was saved at the last minute.”

“To outlive my children and all the others! To live out my years in endless tears!”

Denise turned green, released Anna, and begged of her husband, “All the others? What does she mean?”

André took a deep breath, got down onto his knees next to his wife, and took her hands. “Tante Anna says none of our family is left in Brussels or Antwerp. The only survivors besides her are those who like us left before the war.”

“Rose,” Anna muttered, weeping. “When can I see my sister?”

Very quietly André told Denise, “We’ve lost sixty-five members of our extended family, mostly in Auschwitz. When I think that some of them mocked us when they learned of our plans to leave Brussels…”

“Where are the children?” Anna asked hopefully, drying her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I so need to see them.”

“Playing outside,” Denise breathed huskily. “They’ll be back soon I’m sure.”

“They’re all I have left,” Anna said, smiling as best she could.

“What about the university, your colleagues?” Denise finally thought to ask her husband.

André shuddered. “Alexander Pinkus was arrested as a professor and a Jew. He also died in Auschwitz.” André lowered his head. “At least members of Le Cercle du Libre Examen formed the core of the Resistance. I can be proud of that.” When he looked up again he said, “They’ve made me head of the department. Temporarily.”

In a hushed voice, Denise said, “You hoped for that position someday.”

“Not this way.”

The door opened and the children rushed in. Christel and Cristian began playing with their delighted great aunt immediately. Ida drew her parents into the bedroom.

“We heard a rocket pass overhead. We were so scared! But then some American soldiers came by. One gave each of us a lemon. After that everything was okay until some nasty children in the park pointed at us and called us ‘dirty Jews.’”

“It’s all right, all right,” Denise intoned, pulling her daughter close and wrapping her in her arms. Then she looked at her husband imploringly, eyes full of fear.

“We survived,” André told her compassionately, prayerfully. “With all we have survived.”

André Sauverin returned in October of 1944 to resume teaching at the Free University of Brussels, now a full professor and chair of the Chemistry Department in place of his mentor, Alexandre Pinkus, who had remained in Brussels and subsequently perished at Auschwitz. Alex, returning to Brussels at the war’s end in May 1945, resumed pursuit of his business as an expert philatelist. In 1950 the family immigrated to the United States, André as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in large part because of the Quaker heritage of the city. When Denise died in 1952, André determined to remain permanently in the U.S., resigning his position at the Free University of Brussels—only the second tenured professor at the university to do so since its founding in 1834. He was acclaimed Professeur Honoraire of the University.

He left academia feeling a professor should not teach after age fifty and went into the private sector to develop fuel cell technology for peaceful uses. André, Alex, and Genévieve joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). André died in 1981 leaving three children, their spouses, and seven grandchildren, all Quakers.