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a
JEWISH FATE
     

    D
avid Reich bought his first automobile, a used black Citroën, on Wednesday, May 8, 1940. He sensed that very little time remained for himself and his small family. Only wealthy people were able to afford a car at that time, but David Reich was by no means rich. The thirty-eight-year-old shoe retailer spent virtually his entire savings on the used vehicle, yet the purchase did not fill him with pride. Not at that point in history. Not as an Orthodox Jew in Belgium.
    The writing on the wall was clear enough for those who wanted to read it. The German
Wehrmacht
had just overrun Denmark and Norway, and eight months previously, in September 1939, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland. It was the beginning of World War II, which was soon to develop into the biggest and deadliest conflict in human history. It was probably only a matter of days until the German troops would also attack France via Belgium. By the spring of 1940 it was easy to predict what would then happen to a Jewish family. The racist Nuremberg Laws, which systematically discriminated against and disenfranchised the Jews, had already been in force in Germany since 1935. Books by Kurt Tucholsky, Upton Sinclair, Sigmund Freud, Anna Seghers, and Lion Feuchtwanger had been publicly burned. Jews were effectively excluded from economic,political, and social life in the German
Reich
. Following legal discrimination and the expropriation of Jewish property, the
Kristallnacht
in November 1938 signaled the start of their physical persecution as well.
    Adolf Hitler’s notorious speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, was heard on radios and seen in the weekly newsreels in cinemas. The words tumbled out of the dictator’s mouth in the Reichstag as he screamed, staccato, “If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.” 1
    David Reich, an energetic man possessed of a simple elegance who was the father of a bright five-year old boy, had stopped deluding himself by May 8, 1940. He had already witnessed too much, having personally experienced anti-Semitic persecution, as had his parents and grandparents. He was born in 1902 into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Galician shtetl of Przemyl among the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Pshemishl, as the town was then known in Yiddish, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now situated in southeastern Poland on the border with Ukraine. When the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell during World War I, there were once more terrible pogroms against the Jews in Galicia. David Reich fled with his parents and relatives toward Western Europe.
    He started a new life from scratch twelve hundred kilometers from the place of his birth, in Frankfurt in the German
Reich
. It was an experience he shared with many European Jews, and an experience that in-grained itself in the collective memory of the Jewish people. In many Jewish households a suitcase packed with the essentials was always kept ready at hand, in order to leave at a day’s notice “if it starts again.” After Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, which also brought ultimate power to the Nazis, David Reich soon found it was time to get out that suitcase. Once more he was to leave his home, never to return, as he had done with Pshemishl.
    In this fateful year of 1933 that would lead Germany to its greatest catastrophe, he met a petite, attractive woman called Paula “Pepi” Wang. Born in 1910 in Saarbrücken, she fascinated him, not least with her boundless energy. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to say it. The couple married and decided to settle in Antwerp, a Belgian town of special significance for Jews.