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CHAPTER SEVEN: AGE TEN
Instead of a slag heap, my new playground turned out to be sand dunes at the seashore. Edgard and I were sent to a summer camp where we met many other children who had been hidden during the war. Since everyone there was Jewish, there was no worry about one's name, and the quiet child that I had been at school became very rambunctious, just like all the other children who were at the villa where we stayed.
Contrary to what I remembered from last year at Bible Camp, here there were no prayers at all. Instead, we learned many songs and we played a lot of games. During the day, when the tide was low, we walked or ran on the wide open spaces of the beach, collecting shells and watching the breakers crash along the shore. Overlooking the beaches were the dunes. These were great for climbing or for games of hide and seek. What I liked best was exploring the concrete bunkers that had been part of the German defenses. In one of them we found a periscope. We managed to drag it back to the villa, but we were warned after that not to pick up anything that we might find in the sand, because the Germans had left a lot of mines lying around, and some of them were disguised into such innocuous-looking objects as a fountain pen, or a watch. If it should explode, you could lose an arm or an eye, or even be killed. Needless to say that, on the very next day, this warning was sufficient for us to search avidly for anything that looked potentially like a mine. But we found nothing else of interest.
After spending a few hours in the sand dunes, we would come back to a noisy dining room to eat and to babble away. The counselors that were assigned to us had the hardest time to keep some sort of order, and ours resorted to using his belt as a means of getting us to keep quiet. I hated him. I also hated the cold baths we had to take in the evening because there was no warm water. The counselor said that it was good for us, that it built character, but I never saw him take a cold bath. In spite of the fun that I had during the day, I wanted to go home so that I would not have to be subjected to those frigid ablutions and to that mean counselor.
On visiting day, Edgard and I complained loudly to aunt Rachel about the baths and the belt, and we begged her to take us home. Even though she sympathized with us, we had to stick it out for another few days; but we were delighted when she arrived, at last, to take us back to Brussels.
I was glad to get back to our big house. I now considered it home, and I started to explore the neighbourhood. In the park where we played, across the street from where we lived, there were a few large large buildings bearing the inscription "Museum". I had never been in a museum, and one afternoon I shyly poked my head into the one that was closest to the house. A guard said that I was welcome, if I wanted, to come in and look around as long as I did not touch anything.
I stepped into this unknown world, and I was so enthralled by what I discovered there that I went back many times during the summer. Within a few minutes, I would become an intrepid explorer in a far away land. I spent hours wandering in those cavernous rooms looking at a multitude of ancient and intriguing artifacts. There were prehistoric stone arrows, tools from the bronze age, Roman and Mediaeval helmets and shields, wooden carvings depicting unbelievable tortures to which were subjected the Saints, and many other fascinating objects that allowed me to imagine extraordinary adventures. There was even the real skeleton of a giant mammoth!
In my day-dreams, I was always overcoming impossible odds, refusing to reveal any of the secrets I knew in spite of having to bear the most abominable torments until, inevitably, I emerged victorious from the most distressing situations.
For my tenth birthday I had received many gifts. What I liked best among them were the books, a little meccano set, and a large box of colouring pencils. I would spend hours with those things, all by myself. Aunt Rachel said that, in the fall, Edgard and I would go to a private school where there would be art classes and many other activities beside the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic. I looked forward to that, even though I was still fearful about using my real name.
During the weeks that followed, we received some news about who in our family had survived, and who had been killed.
My uncle Rubin was alive, and he was living in Antwerp after coming back from Germany where he had been working as a slave labourer. He came to see us one Sunday, and he told us that my cousins Ned and Benjamin and their mother, my aunt CÈcile, had been killed. I felt sad about that, because I remembered how much fun we used to have when we got together. My uncle Rubin's father, a grandfather that I had never met, had also died, in Poland.
My cousin Maurice and his parents had somehow made their way out of France and into Spain, then Portugal, and they were now living safely in Canada. We found this out when we received a letter from them via the Red Cross.
As for my father and my uncle Don, Edgard's father, there were no news whatsoever, so we kept hoping that someday their name would appear on the weekly survivor's list.
On the sixth of August, the radio announced that a new American weapon, an atom bomb, had been dropped on a city called Hiroshima, in Japan. The city had been obliterated, and this, it was hoped, would convince the Japs to surrender unconditionally. I was ecstatic at these news, and I wondered why no such bomb had been dropped on Germany. It also deserved to be obliterated.
On August 15, there were great news. The radio announced that Japan had surrendered to the Americans. This meant that the Second World War was now completely over and the papers carried big headlines about it. From now on there would be peace forever in a better world. I took those newspapers and I reverently put them away in a folder, next to the ones that had pronounced the defeat of Germany and the end of the war in Europe.
There were more good news a few days later, when we received a visit from my uncle Moniek. He and my aunt Henya had been hidden in the south of France, and they had come back with a new cousin, Guy, who was now almost four years old. My aunt Henya was expecting another child soon, which meant that I would have another new cousin. Even though they were babies now, I hoped that when they grew up we would be able to start playing together, as I was now able to do with Edgard.
Accompanied by my uncle, we, the three cousins, all went to watch a big victory parade that was being held not far from our house. It was organized by a Scottish regiment, and I found it very impressive to see those giant men, dressed in kilts, marching in step to the stirring sound of bagpipes. I don't know why, but these sounds brought tears to my eyes, and the beating of the drums sent shivers right through my body.
On the Sunday before we were to start school, my uncle Moniek took us to see an exhibition of bronze sculptures by a man called Rodin. I was a bit embarrassed at first to see all those naked people, but I thought that they were beautiful. They reminded me of those miners that I had seen in Charleroi, with their strong muscular arms, all black, and shiny, and proud.
Entering grade five was a completely new experience compared to my previous years at school. For one thing, I had to take a tram to get there. On the first day, aunt Rachel came with us to show us where to take it and where to get off, but after that I would be responsible to stay with Edgard, and we would travel on our own.
There was another thing different about this school: I was greatly relieved to find out that the teachers did not address us by our family name, but by our first name. This suited me just fine.
Finally, there were no desks. Instead, we would sit four or five children at a table. And there were girls in the class, which made me feel even more shy than I was.
I was very quiet when I was at school, but I enjoyed the projects we were given. You were allowed, and even encouraged, to draw illustrations about the subject that was being studied. This gave me another opportunity to use my colouring pencils. In the art class, we were given clay and I made many figures and animals. The teacher picked one of my pieces to be sent to an exhibition of children's work to America.
After we had read a book, we had to talk about it, and the teacher always incited us to say what we thought. Since this led often to arguments and disagreements, I thought it safer not to always say what I really thought as I did not want to make enemies. Even though I got along well with everyone, I did not make any friends at school. I somehow did not quite fit in with the other children.
On the weekends, I often went with Edgard and my grandfather to a movie. The ones I liked best were with Laurel and Hardy, because they were so funny. I also liked the cartoons that came on before the movie, but I always watched the news at the start of the show with a bit of anxiety. Sometimes there were pictures of a concentration camp where Jews or other prisoners had been sent, and I would stare with a lot of fear at those skinny people to see if I could see my father among them.
I still had nightmares, and the slightest noise would wake me up in the middle of the night. From upstairs I was occasionally awakened by my grandparents' snoring. In my own room I would sometimes poke Edgard to get him to stop grinding his teeth, but he did not even wake up. At other times, I could hear aunt Rachel having a nightmare in her bedroom next door. She would shout in her sleep. I asked her one morning to tell me what she had dreamt about, but she did not want to speak too much about it. All she said was that she had once been arrested by the French police while carrying some forbidden papers, and that she managed to escape just before being handed over to the Gestapo. And that is why she had nightmares, she said.
Although I was rather shy at school, at home I became often boisterous and unmanageable. My grandfather wanted to teach me to read Hebrew so that I would be able to start slowly preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, but I would not hear anything about it. I had stopped saying my prayers, but I was not about to start getting involved in any pagan ritual. At Passover he tried to get Edgard or me to take part in the ceremony, but all we were interested in was the delicious food that my grandmother had prepared for the occasion.
Aunt Rachel decided that Edgard and I needed to meet some children who had also been hidden during the war, and even though I did not want to go, we were taken one Saturday afternoon to a house where we found ourselves among a large group of girls and boys. We were divided into different age groups. These were called sections, and each one was named after some hero or martyr who had died during the war. We would get together every Saturday to play games, indoors if it rained, and outdoors when the weather was nice. Sometimes there would be an older person to come and tell us a story about some heroic deed, or to explain that we were pioneers who had to build a new world where there would be no racial discrimination of any type, and therefore Jews would be safe. Such a time would occur eventually, but only when there was no more exploitation of Man by Man, when all ruling classes were abolished, except for the proletariat, and everyone received whatever they wished according to their needs.
I found all this talk a bit boring, and I did not want, at first, to go back to these meetings. But after a while, I started to get to know better some of the other children in my section and we began to have a lot of fun. Since I liked drawing, I was put in charge of our bulletin board, and I even made up a newsletter with a lot of illustrations. I began to look forward to my Saturday afternoons, and I made some friends that I would occasionally invite to come to our house. At least, this year, I was not lonely when the Christmas holidays came around.
I became aware that I was very lucky to be living with my grandparents and my aunt in our big house. Many of the other children had only one parent left, and they were very poor compared to us. Bonne-maman always urged them to eat more when they were visiting, and they did not have to be told twice. You could tell from the way they stared at it that they were very interested in the food. When I occasionally was invited to one of their houses, it often turned out to be a cramped apartment which they had to share with someone else. They seldom had their own room.
One of my new friends, Nick, had been hidden in a convent, and he was familiar with Christmas although he now made fun of what he called "all this religious mumbo-jumbo". He was convinced that things had to be changed here on earth rather than to hope for some Paradise in Heaven. No one had ever come back from Heaven to tell us about it, and he did not believe that there was such a place. He once told me how he remembered seeing his mother being dragged by her hair and thrown into a truck by a German soldier. He had learned that she was now dead. Had there been a God, He would not have allowed such a thing to happen.
These were disturbing thoughts about God, but most of the time we did not talk of such things. We simply had a lot of fun and laughter. Nick was much better than me at throwing a football around -- he was the strongest and the tallest of our section -- and I liked being on his team because we usually ended up winning the game.
Sometimes, on a rainy day, we'd sit around in the dark and make up some weird stories. Everyone was always delightfully scared when I started a tale about an evil butcher who enticed people into his basement. He would always kill them and chop them up into sausage. The butcher's name was Krantz, and he was German of course.
Every few weeks, Jacques and I would get together for a trip to Charleroi. I always liked visiting Godfather, but apart from these visits I had nothing to do with Jacques, even though he had the same family name as me since his mother had married my father. I felt much closer to Edgard and to my new friends in Brussels than to him.
One Sunday in May, an American soldier came knocking at the door. I was surprised to hear him speak French, but it turned out that he was originally from Belgium. His name was Joseph, and he was a nephew of aunt Rachel's who had managed to escape to America with his parents at the beginning of the war. Bonne-maman prepared a big meal for the occasion of this happy reunion. After lunch, Joe, as he was now called, took my cousin, me and my aunt to a lake in the woods where we rented a row-boat. Edgard and I were proud to be seen with an American soldier, and that evening we were very excited when he let us touch his gun.
My aunt looked very sad the next day, after he left, and I found out that he had informed her that her husband had been killed. Joe was working for the American Army Intelligence, and he had found papers in one of the concentration camps in Austria which listed the names of people who had been shot as political prisoners. One of the names was his uncle Don, who was also my uncle as well as Edgard's father.
Every week we found out about more people who had died, and about a few who made it back to Belgium. Aunt Rachel occasionally came back with a survivor from one of the camps and that person often stayed at our house, until she could find a place of her own.
In a couple of months we would be on our summer holidays, and I would be celebrating my eleventh birthday. I started to make plans as to whom should be invited to the party. I also started to think about what gifts I would like to receive. A larger meccano set? A fancy knapsack for the eventual camping trip that we were planning with our section? Now that the world was at peace, I could envisage a lot of interesting things for the future. I was not certain exactly what, but I felt hopeful and optimistic.
One day, a letter arrived from the Red Cross. It was a document that said that my father had been sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, where he disappeared. Officially, he was now presumed to be dead.
After being so long without any news as to his fate, I had prepared myself to expect the worst; but in my mind I still had secretly believed that God would have protected him. This document put an end to my false hope.
I was now an orphan, and yet I considered myself to be very lucky: I had survived when so many others did not, and I still had a family.