Speaking for the dead

Simon Gronowski, who made a miraculous escape from the clutches of the Nazis, tells his story in classrooms throughout Belgium

By ALTHEA WILLIAMS
Gronowski and family521 (photo credit: COURTESY Simon Gronowski)
Gronowski and family521
(photo credit: COURTESY Simon Gronowski)
Simon Gronowski bewitches teenagers.
He magically transforms them in just a few moments from youthful cynics, bored, grinning, pushing, whispering and giggling, into silent and serious young adults. But, then, Simon Gronowski has a trick up his sleeve, he has a story to tell. And he tells it with a frown, glaring from beneath his brows at them, concentrated, weighing his words, often briefly silent.
We’re in Belgium, at one of the many schools Gronowski has visited in the last 15 years. He has spoken to class after class just as he speaks to this one. At 81 years old, he’s small and determined – at first glance, sturdy, at second, frail.
He appears stern, but his first words are mes enfants. “My children,” he says, “I am honored to be here. I am honored to speak to you.
My story is simply this. I lost my mother and my sister, deported and killed because they were Jewish. I will tell you what happened and how I, a boy of 11, escaped that death – and how my father died of grief.”
And Gronowski tells his story. He speaks well. He’s been a lawyer since the age of 23.
At 16, he lived alone and took himself through school and university. For 50 years, he hardly said a word about his past. Then, prompted by the Belgian Holocaust historian Maxime Steinberg and appalled by the recrudescence of Holocaust negationism, he wrote a book about his past. Since then, he speaks often.
His address to the youngsters isn’t complicated.
He sticks to facts, explaining briefly how his parents came to Brussels from Poland and Lithuania during the 1920s; why they left their native countries, and how his father worked in the mines and then built his own business from nothing. He tells them of the arrival of the Germans and what life was like for the Jews under the occupation before the deportations, the registrations, the exclusion from schools and professions, and the curfew.
And then he speaks of their choice to go into hiding and the arrest, one morning in March 1943, of his mother, his sister and himself. His father wasn’t at home.
“My mother to my right, my sister across the table, preparing my sandwiches. Coffee on the table. Then the knock on the door, the Germans bursting in, shouting. My mother asking if le petit had to come too. Yes, I had to come too.”
They were taken initially to Gestapo headquarters, on the prestigious Avenue Louise in Brussels, and then, the following day, to the Kazerne Dossin barracks in Mechelen, a small town between Brussels and Antwerp, the two cities with the highest concentration of Jews. Kazerne Dossin was a transit camp from which 19,000 people had already been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Gronowski and his family stayed there a month, until the Nazis were able to round up enough people for the 20th trainload. On the evening of April 19, the train of cattle cars began its journey. His sister, who held a Belgian passport, was left behind, and was thus briefly spared – until the 22nd train some four months later.
The conditions were appalling. “I will not describe all the details, out of respect for your youth,” Gronowski tells the children with infinite courtesy.
What made the 20th convoy unique was the fact that three young university students had decided to attack it and free as many of the people inside as they could. This was the only such incident during the war and was carried out in the simplest manner. Some 16 kilometers out of the station, the three students stopped the train by putting a red light on the line; they wrenched open a wagon door and shouted, “Flee.” Seventeen people jumped out and they all got away – as did the students, at least for a while. But the attack seemed to have inspired people, and 75 kilometers down the line, the men in Gronowski’s wagon managed to wrench open their own door.
“My mother lowered me by my shoulders onto the footplate below the door,” he recounts.
“I held onto the handrail. My mother said, ‘No, the train’s going too fast!’ But then it slowed, and I jumped.”
Gronowski’s mother couldn’t follow him because the train had stopped. The Germans were firing and heading down the track. The 11-year-old boy fled into the woods.
He ran through the night and reached a village in the early morning. He knocked on a door and said he was lost. Taken to the local policeman, Jan Aerts, he thought he’d been captured. But the policeman guessed who he was. He said – and Gronowski remembers this exactly: “I know everything. I will not betray you. I am a good Belgian.”
Aerts arranged his journey to Brussels, where Gronowski arrived that evening, having avoided all controls. He made his way to friends and was finally reunited with his father, although they spent the remaining 17 months of the war hiding in separate locations.
Gronowski says, “I speak about this for three reasons: to bear witness; to combat anti-Semitism, all forms of discrimination and Holocaust denial; and to honor the dead and the heroes thanks to whom I am alive – Jan Aerts, who risked certain death in protecting me, the Catholic families who hid me during the war, and my mother, surely the first among my heroes.”
Gronowski holds his audience in the palm of his hand. These young people are lucky.
They are part of the last generation to be able to meet survivors like him. It’s unlikely that any of them will forget him completely, and they, at least, are unlikely to doubt whether the Holocaust happened. Will new generations ever care quite as much? Gronowski isn’t too worried. “My children and grandchildren will bear witness,” he says emphatically.
And he mentions the Kazerne Dossin, the new and expensive Memorial, Museum and Documentation Center on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen. Will the transformed Kazerne Dossin do as good a job as Gronowski? Built by the Flemish government at a cost of 25 million euros, it opened in December 2012. If attention to detail and a multiplicity of rare archives are a guarantee of quality, then the Kazerne Dossin may do its job. It’s certainly a popular success and there are always several school groups going round the complex, interactive exhibit organized around the three themes of intolerance, fear and death.
However, the Kazerne Dossin has had its critics. When the first report, ordered by the Flemish government in 2003 with a view to guiding the concept of the new museum, was published in 2005, the commission responsible for the project came under fire from both the Jewish community and Flemish nationalists.
Articles in the Jewish press accused the commission of being “revisionist,” with the intention of dismantling the existing museum and effacing the memory of the Holocaust.
The Flemish press, meanwhile, accused the commission of being anti-Flanders and criticized the project’s working title of Flemish Holocaust Museum, charging that because Flanders didn’t exist as a region at the time of the Holocaust, it was inappropriate. Then the commission criticized the use of the word Holocaust, current in English but less usual in a more European secular tradition. The Flemish government had asked for a museum that examined the “Belgian case” in the story of the Holocaust, the causes, logic and consequences, but also of “other forms of genocide, ethnic cleansing, exclusion, intolerance and racism” from World War II until today. The commission recommended avoiding comparisons – why include Rwanda and not the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, why the Armenian genocide and not Darfur – and indeed, to avoid imitating existing museums in Washington, Jerusalem, London and Paris.
And because 95 percent of the pre-war Jewish population in Belgium were immigrants, it wanted to focus on what was specific to the destiny of Jews in Belgium – which, it believed, should be seen as inextricably linked to the history of immigration, xenophobia, the surveillance of foreign populations, ordinary racism and nationalist tendencies. Illegal immigration, immigrants’ right to vote, language tests for people trying for social housing being hot subjects in Belgium, and of particular importance in the political landscape of Flanders, this approach didn’t suit the Flemish government either. The report was rejected and another was commissioned.
The current museum corresponds fairly closely to the initial approach wished for by the Flemish government. However, the major part of the museum is dedicated to the details of the Jewish experience of the occupation in Belgium and the deportation. And although “Flemish” has been dropped from the title of the museum, it is nevertheless seen by some as in part a political initiative, being a major project of international caliber, carried solely by the Flemish Region.
On the national level, two months before the museum was opened, Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo presented the country’s apologies to the Jewish community for the Belgian state’s complicity in the persecution of Jews and in the deportation. Former prime minister Guy Verhofstadt had, in fact, already made three apologies, in 2002, 2005 (at Yad Vashem) and in 2007. However, they weren’t judged adequate.
Elio Di Rupo’s speech, on the contrary, was considered to be “of historical importance” by Maurice Sosnowski, President of the Coordinating Committee of Belgian Jewish Organizations, while Eric Picard, President of the Association for the Memory of the Shoah, noted that both left and right seemed satisfied.
In his address, Di Rupo announced his intention to invite the Senate to debate a resolution on the responsibility of the Belgian state; and in January of this year, the Belgian Senate unanimously recognized the responsibility of some entities of the state. Following criticism about the “watering down” of the resolution, the Senate issued a strengthened version, acknowledging the “responsibility of Belgian authorities, and through it that of the Belgian state, in the persecution of Jews in Belgium.”
The Kazerne Dossin stands in Mechelen, and despite the criticism, and despite the ongoing debate on Belgian responsibility, notably on the question of compensation, it is indeed a memorial to the 25,484 Jews and over 352 Roma who were deported from there and out of whom only five percent survived.
It’s also a memorial to the 20th convoy, to the three young resistance fighters.
In any case, Gronowski isn’t too concerned by the debates. He knows what he thinks. “I speak to you so that you will never let this happen again in your country,” he says to the rows of quiet adolescents. “I stand against anti- Semitism, against denial of the Holocaust, against fascism. I stand for today’s sans-papiers in memory of my parents, who were also illegal immigrants. And there are two words, the most important, that I would like you to remember and I will stand to say them.” And he slowly stands. “They are peace and friendship.”
The room explodes into applause.
Simon Gronowski betwitches teenagers.
Can the Kazerne Dossin do the same?
Althea Williams is a former deputy director of the Belgian chapter of Amnesty International. Simon Gronowski’s new book ‘Ni victime ni coupable enfin libérés’ written with K. Tinel and D. Van Reybrouck is being published in April. It describes Gronowski’s meeting with Tinel, the son and brother of Flemish collaborators.