Summer is over! We have a lot of great stuff going on and are looking forward to our upcoming EAC meeting on September 16. I am pleased to know that we continue to make strong progress on a number of fronts, and I am excited to work with Dr. Norm Beauchamp as he settles into his role as EVP. He is a wonderful partner for our efforts.
As happens far too often, I have had to have difficult and sad conversations with two of my patients who have entered hospice. Plus, we lost one of the giants in the field of cancer immunotherapy, Jeff Weber, last month; Jeff had pancreatic cancer. Just this week we commemorated the death of our son-in-law’s dad from the same disease. There is still so much to do to fight against the ravages of horrible diseases.
As if that were not enough, there was another horrific school shooting last week. In our field, we work so hard to save lives, one at a time, yet innocents suffer and die at the hands of strangers (or even people they know) all too often.
With this as a background I would like to share with you what I did when our family took a summer trip.
Most vacations are wonderful. Some are memorable. Only a few are extraordinary. Extraordinary vacations involve life-changing experiences and create enduring memories that alter people and families, leaving imprints on future generations. What follows is a journal of just one day of our extraordinary trip to Belgium in the summer of 2024. I know this is a longer than usual blog, but it’s important to me to share this story.
The Set Up
I am the son of a Belgian Holocaust survivor, a hidden child who somehow avoided capture, as did the rest of her family. We lost her to multiple myeloma in 1992, but wanted our kids to really understand her history. We visited some of her hiding places in 1997, escorted by my Dad, who knew where some of them were located. However, he could not find her most important hiding place, the Groene Villa in Rijmenam, a rural suburb of Brussels.
Exploring our mother’s Holocaust experience has been one of a handful of life-long magnificent obsessions for my younger brother, Steve. He is an authentically sweet human being in the best of ways — deeply empathic, powerfully engaged, always involved in the lives of people he loves — meaning everyone. He is a clinical psychologist who makes his living doing organizational training for the financial services industry (that is, he humanizes financial advisors for a living). Building on his enduring fascination with history, his doctoral dissertation was on the adult children of Holocaust survivors — in other words, us. Finally, he is a remarkably talented musical comedy composer, with many wonderful shows and scores in his portfolio. He is nobody’s dope. Most importantly, he is perhaps the finest man I have ever known. We have been each other’s lifelong wingmen.
Steve has written a wonderful, deeply researched and moving history of our mother’s experiences as a hidden child, titled “Dearest Ones.” He has nurtured deep and meaningful connections with our Belgian family members and with many Belgian people with a connection to the Holocaust and its aftermath. A few years ago, I wrote a series of poems that reflect on many of our mom’s stories that he describes in his book. Finally, Harriet and I have embarked on an ekphrastic collaboration where her paintings are visual reflections on my poetry. For all these reasons, a trip to Belgium made a lot of sense for us.
For my brother’s birthday in December 2023, I had told him I would take him to the World War II Museum in New Orleans. For Steve, both time and history stopped in 1945, when World War II and the Jewish Holocaust ended. As the year passed, we realized that Steve was going to England to reconnect with his buddies from his junior year abroad at the University of Nottingham. He suggested that we meet in Belgium to retrace some of our mom’s steps and visit our remaining family. I said that I would cover his costs in Belgium instead of New Orleans. It was a no-brainer.
Our first cousin, who is my age, has had a terrible past two years. First, she lost her husband, and then was diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer, which was treated with surgery and then adjuvant chemotherapy with FOLFOX, which knocked her socks off. Unfortunately, her CEA tumor marker never really dropped, and she was found to have a large, solitary liver metastasis. I had her see a leading colon cancer authority in Brussels. Eventually, she underwent a partial hepatectomy, followed by additional chemotherapy that wore her down, with profound loss of appetite and weight loss.
Steve and I decided to see her because, while she has a chance to be cured, I know all too well that it does not always end well. Ironically, as we were traveling, one of my favorite patients, only 56 years old, fighting metastatic colon cancer for the past five years, was nearing the end of his cancer journey, wracked with pain and mourning the looming end of his life. It was important to see our cousin now.
The Trip
So we made our arrangements. We decided to take our oldest grandson, Isaac (who now goes by Indigo), a whip-smart 13-year-old, as a belated b’nai mitzvah gift. Indy, as we call him, read my brother’s self-published book about my mom’s experiences during the Holocaust, taught himself nearly fluent conversational French and was excited to join us not only for the history but for the chance to meet new members of his family. His mom, Elana, decided to join us because Indy was coming and he, like any young teenager, can be a handful at times. Her husband, Ben, and their other two kids stayed behind, as did our other two kids and their families. If our finances and health hold up, we hope to have similar trips to Belgium with all of our grandchildren as they become “of age.”
We booked a stay at the Marriott Grand Place in Brussels. We had an uneventful flight, and spent a few days in Brussels before having a wonderful visit with our cousin and her family. Up to that point the first four days of our vacation had been upbeat. Then came the day I will remember for the rest of my life.
Steve — to be known moving forward as “Dr. Holocaust Vacation” — arranged the day for us. After breakfast, we took a brief walk and then went to the car and drove to Rijmenam to meet Emy, the 91-year-old niece of the man who hid my mother’s family when they first went into hiding.
Our grandfather, seeing the arrests and deportations of Jews in Brussels nearing the end of 1942, approached his two best non-Jewish customers (he sold leather goods) to see if they could help. The first one denounced them; our mother and her family escaped with only the clothes on their backs. The second one, Leonard van Rillaer, had a country home in the then-distant Brussels suburb of Rijmenam and offered to rent it to him.
The family departed Brussels one by one on separate trolleys to avoid a group capture. My mother went last. While on the trolley, a German officer motioned her over and made the terrified 12-year-old girl sit on his lap. He told her she reminded him of his daughter, and then left her alone. The family hid in that house, going out pretty much only at night, dependent on the kindness of others for food and other necessities. They were living in proximity to the town of Mechelen (Malines in French), which was home to the train station that served as a major deportation center of Jews to Auschwitz. My grandfather made leather goods in the house that van Rillaer then sold as a way to pay rent.
As reports of denunciations and deportations intensified, my then 13-year-old mother eventually left this house and went into hiding in other safe houses, and even in a convent in and around the environs of Liège, which is in the southeast part of Belgium, north of the Ardennes. Her parents and sister stayed behind; her sister’s boyfriend and future husband was hiding nearby. But without the kindness of van Rillaer, she would have been nothing more than another grim statistic, and we, our children and grandchildren would have never existed.
The Groene Villa
It was time to finally catch the Weiner family’s Great White Whale. It was especially powerful and poignant to go to the house — the Groene Villa (it was covered in moss and painted green at the time of the war) — to walk where she once walked, to try to imagine how she must have felt, and most importantly, to share our gratitude with descendants of a man who literally risked his own life to save an innocent family and make our lives possible. Similar remarkable acts of grace and courage happened throughout Belgium, making it possible for nearly half of its Jewish population to survive the Holocaust.
We got to the house at 11 a.m. It continues to be in a remote location and is modest in its dimensions and furnishings. Still very much a country home designed as a weekend getaway by its original builder, it now is painted white, has a more modern addition, and for many years was inhabited by van Rillaer’s granddaughter. Her nephew now lives in it, and she lives independently in a small cottage on the property.
Her nephew lives in it now, and she lives independently in a small cottage on the property. We met her — a remarkably active and physically robust woman who prepared a lovely lunch for us. We were joined by her niece, who works as a lawyer, and her two sons, one a classical musician and another in college. The two of them share an apartment in Amsterdam and came in to meet us.
This was a remarkable moment for us, but I think it resonated just as deeply for our hosts. Our visit was a major event for them too. Just as we have our family legends, they have theirs, and I suspect that we were the physical manifestations of their stories. I felt my mother’s presence on the property as we sat and talked and wondered what she, my grandparents and aunt would think of our being in this spot. Would it have been too painful for them to contemplate?
Unsurprisingly, we bonded quickly around our shared histories and our hopes for a better future. I felt an emotional high, the untying of a lifelong, stubborn knot, as we hugged and then departed for a far more sobering experience — a visit to a true Gate to Hell.
The Gate to Hell
We drove from Rijmenam to the Kazerne Dossin, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Mechelen. I have been to Holocaust museums that describe what happened, who it happened to and who made it happen, explain how it happened and challenge us to consider what it all means. I have visited Dachau, where it happened. But that bleak killing ground did not put faces to the numbers.
Kazerne Dossin (Barracks Design in Dutch) is where the lives of many thousands of innocents, both ordinary and extraordinary, changed in a flash. Where they were housed in inhuman conditions for times ranging from a few days to a few months before they were transported by cattle car (one of which is adjacent to the courtyard) to be murdered at Auschwitz and elsewhere.
Kazerne Dossin is now a museum, and Steve had been in contact with its director, who, since we had been delayed by lunch, apologized for not being able to meet us. Instead, we were met by the museum’s archivist, who was waiting for us, as we had a job to do. We took a tour, learned that some of the sadistic jailers had been executed after the war, and the barracks had been converted for years into apartments (if only those walls could talk!) before it became a museum.
The walls of the main exhibition space are covered with the digitized photographs, names and ages of the doomed, with other artifacts such as letters, marriage certificates and occasional religious pieces such as menorahs. An interactive video display allows one to search for and find anybody who had passed through there on their ways to their executions.
It was there that I met some members of my family for the first time. We found three of them — a 48-year-old great-uncle, his 31-year-old wife and their 10 — yes, 10-year-old — daughter, saw their pictures, mourned their deaths and then were escorted to a recording studio where Steve recited their names and ages for posterity.
We then saw additional exhibits, one of which runs continuous audio loops of the names and ages of the victims, recited by their surviving family members and descendants, so that their memories remain tangible. The next room was devoted to the children — so many of them, so young, all robbed of their futures: of the children they would never have, and of the myriad opportunities they might have seized to make the world a better place. The last room we saw was devoted to a video interview of an elderly Belgian man, one of the very rare Auschwitz survivors, describing the last time he saw his wife and his three little children when their train arrived at the death camp on the way to their murders.
There was nothing more to say, nothing left to feel. We left the museum, surprising our guide, who wanted to show us everything. Steve was anxious to stay, but for the rest of us, all our pieces had been broken and we needed time to reassemble them.
We drove back to Brussels. The car was quiet as we drove through the rain (the only rain we experienced that week). We had dinner plans that evening with our second cousin, his wife, their son and his girlfriend. Our second cousin is the son of my mother’s cousin Ginette; during the war my mother somehow learned that she and her younger brother, both of them just children, ages 9 and 7, had been captured and were in a detention and deportation center in Brussels. My mother got word to her father, through a letter that we still have. He alerted the Resistance, who rescued the children.
Both of them traveled to the U.S. for my mother’s funeral in 1992. We have known our cousin and his family for years. He is a musician and photographer, and she is an attorney whose clients include the estate of the great Belgian artist René Magritte. Their son and his girlfriend are physicists who study quantum mechanics in Germany (proof that change is possible).
We had a great meal together, highlighted by great conversation, enormous warmth, fine wine and a fabulous homemade lasagna. We brought a cake that Steve and Indy had purchased at Le Pain Quotidien near the Grande Place in Brussels (it a Belgian chain that is now in the U.S. — I did not have the heart to tell Steve that), and our hosts graciously accepted and served our gift for dessert. Elana quickly bonded with the two physicists over data science and quantum mechanics. Indy’s surprisingly deep understanding of history and politics made him a valuable and exuberant contributor to our conversations.
Our cousins described the increasingly precarious situation for Jews in contemporary Belgium, with police protection for all synagogues and religious schools, outright antisemitism in the media and popular culture, and growing intolerance. They are sophisticated and fundamentally balanced people and are not at all alarmist, but they have purchased a property in Costa Rica that they use for vacations and as a possible “safe haven” should the unthinkable happen again, albeit in a different form.
We Ubered back to the hotel, exhausted, haunted, exhilarated and a bit overwhelmed by a day like no other.
Postscript
I may never fully process all that happened on that day. It is a miracle that I exist at all. I remain troubled and deeply saddened by the extraordinary capacity of humans to hate and kill.
I have worn the burden of my mother’s story like a lead vest throughout my life. Her story, and that of so many others, even when coupled with the wider recognition of the horrors of the Holocaust, only briefly muffled the fundamentals of human hate and intolerance, be it against Jews or any other marginalized group. I worry for the future, yet retain a basic optimism, because my mother and her family survived through the intercession of a series of righteous people. There will be others who answer the call when asked. If needed, I will be one of them. Thus, I hope. I will not despair.
Make the world a better place this week.
Lou
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