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Second Escape, May 14, 1940

On the morning of Friday, May 10, 1940, readers of the daily Brussels newspaper Le Soir found a routine front-page photograph of the Belgian princes Baudouin and Albert opening the Hunting, Fishing, Sports and Tourism Exposition at Brussels’ Centenaire Palace Hall the day before. And they could also read that “the advance of the German forces in Norway had been slowed.” But that morning those same readers also heard unaccustomed waves of airplanes overhead and then the frightening thud of bombs falling nearby. The much-feared German invasion of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France had been unleashed, and it would dramatically change the lives of the Jewish-German and Jewish-Austrian refugee children who had only recently found safety and hope in Belgium.

The sound of numerous airplanes in the Brussels sky put the whole population on edge, concerned whether the Belgian forces would be able to repel the German attack. On the radio they heard bulletins offering mostly reassuring news.

Here is how these events affected me and our other refugee children:

“A low and continuing thunder awoke me from my sleep. Suddenly I heard the noise of the windows in our room shaking, and a clear, high sound, like screams of fear. I jumped out of bed to learn what was happening and there was lightning and an explosion and then again lightning and an explosion, and then a strange silence in anticipation of new explosions. The air-raid sirens started to shriek, making a long and nerve-racking noise,” recalls Ruth Schütz Usrad, who was living at Home Général Bernheim.¹

Edith Goldapper Rosenthal recounts in her diary: “We hear artillery fire outside. Yes it is May 10, 1940, and the war in Belgium has begun. We are overcome by panic. With every sounding of the alarm we bound into the basement [of Home Général Bernheim]. In our free time we attempt to dig a bomb shelter and we use it.”²

Similar emotions prevailed at the main boys’ refugee home, Home Speyer in Anderlecht. We older boys knew only too well the threat that German success posed for all of us, while the younger ones may have noticed the commotion but were more concerned about the interruption of their playtime and when it would be time for their next meal.

At first, the population relied on the optimism of the prewar months. Two days after the attacks, Le Soir reported that blackout material was being sold and that people had not panicked. The story said that the radio was playing “Nous allons pendre notre linge . . .” (the previously-mentioned clothes-hanging song), “Madelon,” and “Auprès de ma blonde . . .” (a romantic soldiers’ ditty). A front-page article on May 12 concludes, “Belgium deals, intact and determined, with this new confrontation which has descended upon it.”³

But on page 3, Le Soir reported that forty-one persons were killed and eighty-two wounded by the bombing raids in the Brussels area. The Defense Department claimed that fifteen Nazi planes had been downed. The adult populations of Holland, Belgium, and northern France remembered all too well the ravages caused in their regions by World War I and they fled southward, panic-stricken, in a mass exodus by train, car, bus, on bicycles, on carts, and on foot. Four million French, Belgian, and other refugees, trying to flee before the German advance, were on the roads or camped in makeshift shelters.⁴

By May 14, fear and panic had deepened for our Jewish refugee children’s groups. That day Elka Frank, director of the Général Bernheim girls’ home, told her protégées to pack their belongings and to wear extra layers of clothes for their flight from Brussels. Her husband, Alex, was a Belgian soldier, guarding a military airfield, so the young home director was on her own and worrying about the safety of her more than thirty girls.

The DeWaays at Home Speyer also told us to get ready and pack lightly for departure, but to carry food rations. Both groups met that afternoon at the Schaerbeek rail station in central Brussels, which was packed with anxious refugees, waiting for transportation to the south. By evening our group of ninety-three boys and girls was told to climb into two separate freight cars and the train took off into the unknown late that night, each freight car packed with refugees fleeing the city.

The children of our two refugee homes were joined by others who had been placed with families or who were siblings of a child at either home.⁵ Edith (“Ditta”) Weisz Kurzweil was summoned to rush from her foster home, where the host family was fleeing to the countryside, to join her brother Hansl Weisz at Home Speyer before our group left for the train station.⁶ The oldest children were just seventeen and the youngest, Antoinette Steuer, would soon be four years old.

Some of the children later credited a brother of Alex Frank, who had worked for the Belgian government, as facilitating the access to the refugee freight train. Others proclaimed that the Women’s Committee had abandoned the children while saving themselves. That allegation is contradicted by a recorded interview of committee member Mme Alfred Wolff in the 1950s.⁷

Mme Wolff recalls being left alone at the committee office on May 10 and directing some children who had been placed with individual families to join the two fleeing groups (see previous paragraph). She also recalls that Committee President Mme Goldschmidt-Brodsky was out of town but returned the day of the invasion. Mme Wolff also stated that Mme Goldschmidt-Brodsky “had turned over a large sum of money to the Foyer des Orphelins to assure the future of the children” (the Foyer owned and managed the Home Speyer facility). Records in its archive indicate that the funds deposited for this purpose by Mme Goldschmidt-Brodsky were, in fact, given to Gaspard DeWaay before the children departed.⁸

This is supported by a statement of Mme Lucienne DeWaay, who told Dr. Theo Tschuy in 2003 that her husband, Gaspard, met with Mme Goldschmidt-Brodsky in Cahors, France, in August 1940 when the couple moved back to Belgium. During this visit he allegedly returned to her the remaining funds not yet spent for the children whom he had led to France. The Foyer archive also contains a copy of the receipt that details the funds turned over by DeWaay to his successor, Alex Frank, and signed by Frank on September 6, 1940.

A strong contradiction to the “abandonment” accusation arises from subsequent well-documented actions of several Women’s Committee members. Mmes Felddegen and de Becker had emigrated to the United States before the German invasion, as had Max Gottschalk. However, already on November 14, 1939, Marguérite Goldschmidt-Brodsky had written to Lilly Felddegen in New York, “although the current fears have calmed down, I have made an agreement with the president of the ‘Foyer des Orphelins’ that our children and our funds would be transferred to them if ever we became unable to take care of our little protégés. In that case our office would be dissolved immediately and all files would be transferred by my secretary, Mademoiselle Chevron, to the Foyer headquarters. Fortunately children would be in less danger than adults.”⁹

It is unlikely that either Elka Frank or Gaspard DeWaay had the authority, as staff employees, to evacuate the ninety-three children under their care to an unknown destination without committee approval. Both were under thirty years old and Lucienne DeWaay was six months pregnant with their second child. In a letter to the Joint Distribution Committee in New York from Cahors, France, dated July 16, 1940, Marguérite Goldschmidt-Brodsky stated “the children escaped with the Belgian director[,] Mr. DeWaay, his wife and two female teachers,” implying that she was fully involved in the escape process.¹⁰

Not all of the committee’s young refugees were on the escape train the night of May 14. On May 10 the Belgian Justice Minister, panicked by the surprise German attack, had decreed that all German nationals over the age of eighteen were to be interned in order to protect Belgium against suspected saboteurs. These arrests included anti-Nazi German and Austrian refugees, as well as Jewish men and older teenagers who had fled from the Nazis. Thus Walter Kamlet, Heinz Storosum, Werner Epstein, and Ernst Schlesinger, husband of the girls’ home’s cook, Flora, and Elias Haskelevicz of the committee office staff were first interned and then evacuated to France in closed box cars.

Many of these men and teenagers ended up in French internment camps. Those named here eventually were freed and rejoined the children’s colony in France. In her letter to the American Joint Distribution Committee in New York, Mme Goldschmidt-Brodsky specifically asked that “the Joint” representatives in France “help free two of our older boys from the internment camp of St. Cyprien, Kurt Moser and Berthold Elkan.”¹¹

As the train slowly steamed out of the Brussels station on May 14, the feeling was “go fast, go fast.” Yet, to us fleeing children the train seemed to be crawling, undecided which way to turn. The Germans took over Brussels just two days later, but we were not to know this until much later. Fleeing for one’s life makes even the most primitive conditions bearable. With only straw on the floor and without toilet facilities, the escape train ride was no picnic. It became all the more frightening since no one could provide answers about the route being taken or the destination. At the time, the most important thing was to get away.

Especially disturbing was the uncertainty over whether the French, British, and Belgian armies were winning or losing. Unlike today, news traveled slowly and rumors replaced information. As we read the train station signs, it became apparent that our refugee train was heading toward northwestern France, and then turned southward. Amiens, Rouen, and Alençon likely were among the way stations, but soon the train seemed to seek its way through territory unknown to any of us.

During prolonged stops at unfamiliar stations, local French people offered beverages and sandwiches to the fleeing travelers. Finding toilet facilities or open fields became urgent daylong concerns. “There were no toilets in our magnificent freight car, so this becomes one of the most urgent problems to be solved,” recalls Edith Goldapper Rosenthal in her diary. “It’s dicey to get out of the car because there is no known stop and start schedule. And at night I don’t dare to close my eyes.”¹²

On rail sidings we sometimes saw wounded French and British soldiers in halted railcars, a stark reminder that war was underway. This was intensified one night in Abbeville. “That night the train was attacked by dive bombers. We headed for Dieppe and the train sat there for a long time,” Rosenthal writes.¹³ Ruth Schütz Usrad also recalls that “the last car in which Belgian nuns were traveling was hit.” She adds, “we traveled through France from north to south, without seeing any of its views, its scenery or its cities.”¹⁴

By May 18 our meandering train had traversed regions of central and southern France that we, as children, had never even seen on a map. It might as well have been Spain or North Africa. Tired of the stress of fleeing and weary from the uncomfortable train ride, we were ordered from our freight cars onto the platform of a tiny station at Villefranche-de-Lauragais, some twenty-five miles south of Toulouse. For all of us it was an unknown region and landscape, but one which we were to get to know intimately in the following three years.

Dead-tired, frightened, and wondering what would come next, we soon found ourselves in a tiny and remote village called Seyre, a few kilometers over the gentle hills from the Villefranche train station.

Our home for the next eleven months turned out to be a large empty barn building at an isolated crossroad and set in the midst of a few farmhouses. The few other buildings of Seyre were the farm homes of very ordinary citizens who spoke a strange southern French dialect (pâtois). In 1938, the 113 inhabitants spread over the adjoining hillsides actually were the successors of a community founded 700 years before, a fact that we didn’t know or contemplate at the time.¹⁵

The barn was just space, two stories high with some interior walls dividing it into primitive rooms. The structure contained no furniture; there were no sleeping facilities except straw on the floor, no running water or electricity, no cooking facilities, and no toilets. Most of our boys and girls, coming from two separate group homes in Belgium, did not even know each other because we had traversed France in separate, if adjacent, freight cars.

A few hundred yards from the barn sat a lovely little château built on top of a hillside, the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Gaston de Capèle d’Hautpoul, who owned much of the surrounding agricultural land and the “barn.” For the first night, the ninety-three children and our caretakers simply went to sleep, exhausted from our escape and from the five-day journey into the unknown.

7. View of the “Barn” at Seyre, France, where the children lived from May 1940 for nearly one year. Photo taken by the author in 2000.

Who selected the site and who decided that our refugee group and our caretakers were to leave the train and come to live at Seyre, of all places? We never asked and none of the children ever knew. During a visit by the author with the then ninety-year-old Mr. Gaston de Capèle d’Hautpoul at his château in 1997, he explained that in 1939 regional government authorities had researched and identified possible sites for refugees, planning for the possibility of a German invasion. His “barn” at Seyre became one of the many sites that were designated for refugees. Mr. de Capèle was away as a French army officer and his family was living in a Toulouse apartment when our refugee group arrived on May 18.¹⁶

The “barn,” which after 1941 has served only for agricultural storage, actually had a different and more appropriate history. Known locally as “l’arsénal” (granary), according to Mr. René de LaPortalière, son-in-law of Mr. deCapèle, it had been intended and built as an orphanage for some 100 children by Countess Marguérite d’Hautpoul-La Terrace in the early 1900’s.

It was designed with separate dormitory spaces at each end and classroom space in the center. Proceeds from the farmland were to fund the operation of the orphanage. It was, however, never occupied until we arrived on May 18. Childless, the countess had adopted her nephew Gaston de Capèle, who inherited the properties in 1937.¹⁷

In our isolated rural surroundings we were unaware of the enormous flood of Belgian refugees whom the German invasion had brought to the area in and around Toulouse. The available data vary. Jean Estèbe cites unofficial figures that indicate that the population of Toulouse more than doubled (from 213,000 in 1936 to 450,000–500,000 in June 1940).¹⁸ Rodolfo Olgiati, secretary-general of the Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kriegsbeschädigte Kinder (Swiss Working Group for Child War Victims) reported “conservative estimates of 1.5 million Belgian refugees in southern France” in the confidential summary of his late July 1940 inspection tour of Vichy France.¹⁹

A police report of June 6, 1940, records the arrival of 16,549 Belgian civilians plus 26,468 Belgian soldiers in the Toulouse area by May 27.²⁰ Other reports describe refugees camped out in all available public spaces in Toulouse. Thus our children’s colony newly arrived at Seyre was just a tiny part of the exodus from the north.