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Antwerp was at that time (and is now once again) one of the great centers of European Jewry. The city on the river Scheldt is a commercial center with a glorious past and boasts one of the largest ports in the world. The French historian Fernand Braudel described it as “the centre of the entire international economy” in the sixteenth century. 2 Portuguese ships unloaded their precious cargos there, whether pepper from India or cloves from Zanzibar. It was an international, cosmopolitan town of traders and businessmen from the major trading nations all unified in their desire to make a profit. It was also an extremely tolerant town that permitted the development of a large Jewish community. David S. Landes characterizes Antwerp as a center of industrial, commercial, and mental progress used to economic, intellectual, and spiritual diversity. 3
    The city to which David and Paula Reich emigrated in late 1933 was the most important center for the global diamond trade. Eighty percent of the world’s finished diamonds were produced and traded here. 4 Of all the diamond businesses, 90 percent were in Jewish hands, but David Reich did not have either the luck or the right contacts to get a foothold in this lucrative business. He thus practiced one of the few professions that had been open to European Jews for centuries: trade. He worked harder than most and traded everything that could be sold, first scrap metal and then fabric, before concentrating on shoes. “David was always on the move. He was very dynamic and had lots of ideas,” a family friend told me. Antwerp was a town that imbued its inhabitants with a mercantile mentality.
    Their income was sufficient to ensure a modest lifestyle—an apartment in the inner city, three meals a day, and an occasional trip to the movies. Today it would be called lower middle class. Their little paradise was complete when Paula Reich gave birth to a boy on the afternoon ofTuesday, December 18, 1934. They called him Marcell, after Mars, the Roman god of war. His middle name was David, after his father.
    Marcell David Reich, who was later to make a name for himself as Marc Rich, was born into a devout Orthodox family that adhered to kosher rules and said Hebrew prayers. His father was a learned man, strict with himself and with his family, and uncompromising when it came to discipline, hard work, and religion. He was a demanding father whom Marc adored. He was also a reliable, honest man who could be trusted implicitly. Paula, his mother, was an astute, intelligent, and subtly ironic woman of French stock with a natural air of authority about her. Throughout her life she had two heroes: her husband and her son Marc. Friends of Marc remember her as a typical “Jewish mother”—caring, encouraging, and overprotective. Young Marc grew up bilingually, speaking his father’s native German at home as well as his mother’s French. He attended Tachkemoni School in downtown Antwerp, a Jewish school that still exists near Pelikaanstraat, the town’s world-famous diamond center. He loved Selma, his German nanny, with all his heart.
The Escape from the Holocaust
     
    It could have been a decent life, but then it did “all start again.” It was once more time to get out the packed suitcase. By May 8, 1940, there was real cause to fear that the Nazis would bring the whole of Europe to its knees, and so David Reich spent virtually everything he had in order to buy the used black Citroën. It was a prudent move, for Nazi Germany commenced its push westward two days later. On Friday, May 10, 1940, at 5:35 A.M . the Low Countries were attacked by the
Wehrmacht
, and the
Luftwaffe
bombed the port of Antwerp.
    “My father put us all in the car. My mother, my nurse Selma, myself. We started to drive away. I saw the German planes. I heard the bombings,” says Marc Rich. We sit in his office in the Swiss town of Zug and drink coffee. We talk about his childhood, his relationship to his parents, and