Launch of the exhibition

Saved – for the time being

Kindertransport to Belgium 1938/1939

at the LVR Landeshaus in Cologne-Deutz

Speech by Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt
Cologne 28 November 2019

“Eighty years ago, in March 1939 - I was almost 7 years old - I made a stopover here in Cologne. I was on a Kindertransport that took me from Vienna, my hometown, to Brussels. I was travelling together with 125 other Jewish children, escorted by Red Cross auxiliaries. I do not quite remember but the children coming from Austria like me, presumably got off the train and were welcomed in rooms of the Jewish community, maybe even at the Jawne, to be gathered together with children from different cities in Germany (Berlin, Bochum, Cologne...) before leaving for Belgium. Even if I have forgotten the details of this stopover, I do remember very well the event that led to my exile: the Anschluss.

I do remember the ‘happy entry’ of the Führer into Vienna on 15 March 1938; I can recall it as if it happened today. I was not yet 6 years old, and I was up in an attic. A neighbour, even though he was a member of the Nazi party, had warned Mother, “We’re going to beat up some Jews today.” All the same, in spite of this, he had taken the risk of offering to shelter us. The attic where we were hidden was at the very top of a building near Heldenplatz where Hitler was giving his speech. I was huddled, petrified, in my mother’s arms and I could hear the cheers, the strident songs such as the ‘Horst Wessel Lied,’ and ‘Sieg Heils’ coming up from the street where the crowds were joining in with jubilation. I still have in my ears the sound of the SA militiamen’s boots, the Brownshirts, their belligerent songs, then: a declamation, followed by a silence which lasted four steps…. Likewise, the rhythm of the Hitlerjugend marches still resonates in me, to the sound of the drum: two slow strokes, tam-tam, followed by three quick strokes, tam-tam-tam...The daily abuses and harassment of Jews - boycotted or plundered shops, old men forced to sweep the pavements with toothbrushes, teachers, doctors and civil servants kicked out of their workplaces... - proved to be nothing more than a dress rehearsal for the progrom “Kristallnacht”, (the Night of Broken Glass) from 9 -10 November 1938, a precursor of the Holocaust.

This exhibition reminds us that the emotion of this bloody night caused Great Britain, pressured by prominent English Jews, to agree to take in an unlimited number of unaccompanied children. The Belgian government was less generous. Between 2 and 8 January 1939, the Belgian Border Police refused entry into the country to about seventy unaccompanied Jewish children. The Catholic Minister of Justice, Joseph Pholien, justified this to himself in terms made even more scandalous by the passage of time: “The German authorities turn a blind eye to the exodus of Jews. We complained to the Reich government, and, on 22 October, an agreement was signed according to which Germany promised not to encourage further immigration to our country.” The press reacted vehemently. Letters and protest telegrams were sent to the government which was also put under pressure by the Comité d'Assistance aux Enfants Juifs Réfugiés (Assistance Committee for Jewish Refugee Children) created in November 1938. In mid-January 1939, Joseph Pholien announced that the door would be open to another 750 unaccompanied children.

I was one of these children. I had the good fortune to be given priority for a Kindertransport to Belgium because of dramatic circumstances: my father was interned in Dachau concentration camp one month after the Anschluss before being transferred to the camp at Buchenwald. I remember my departure from Vienna very well too. The day before, my mother had taken me to the Prater Ferris wheel for the first time. I remember the scenes of desolation on the platform of the West-Bahnhof Wien. You can easily imagine the agony of my mother and all these parents, driven by the increase in antisemitic persecution in Germany and Austria, to send children alone to unknown people, in countries and languages that were unknown to them, without any certainty of ever seeing them again!

I tried to describe the distress of these children who had been abandoned, left alone, in a novel published six years ago which will be adapted for the cinema next year: Le Chemin du Bonheur.

“The train journey from Vienna to Brussels took place in an endless black tunnel. Blinding flashes of light broke the darkness as they passed unknown stations where the Kindertransport was slowed down or stopped. The night emphasised the disturbing nature of the noises: loudspeakers that spit out the name of the place or signal the passage of a convoy of “outcasts,” the whispering of the locomotives being supplied with water, railway men hammering the rails. Children were squeezed onto the wooden benches of third-class carriages – some were dizzy, others cried all the time, others called for their mother or father. The nurses tried to calm them down. At dawn, the train stopped for a longer time, the last stop before the Belgian border. Voices shouted: "Kontrollpapier”. Police officers or Gestapo civilians wearing swastika bracelets stared at these children as if they were criminals on the run.”

When I arrived in Brussels, I was comforted by the warm welcome of a Belgian Jewish couple, David and Fanny Dorn. I was also reassured by meeting my uncle, Sam Rosenblatt, my father's younger brother, who had fled Austria in time to take refuge in Belgium, before heading for the United States. He was the one who convinced them to take me in. The following events were unfortunately all too common: very quickly, my mother having thought she had sent me to safety, the Nazis caught up with me in Belgium in May 1940! I experienced the gradual increase in antisemitic measures: bans on professions, exclusion from public places, being deprived of schooling, and the badge intended to stigmatise us, the yellow star. On 3 September 1942, a few months after the "final solution to the Jewish problem" was elaborated in Wannsee, we miraculously escaped the major raid during which, in several districts of Brussels, all Jews became its victims. The house inhabited by my host family was located on a small square and slightly set back from a main street and was overlooked by the Germans.

From that moment on, my story became one of the many variations of the Hidden Children's Great Book. Marthe Van Doren, “righteous amongst the nations” a long time before that description even existed, a brave Catholic woman with no political commitment but who took action from the goodness of her heart, agreed to hide me in the back room of her laundry in another part of Brussels, thereby risking her life. Deprived of being able to go out and of any contact with other children, I had no other distraction than listening to the radio and reading in the evening. Marthe, who was illiterate, borrowed books at random from the community library, without being able to explain that she had taken in a child. Thus, between the ages of 10 and 12, I read a lot of things without always understanding them, Hugo and Balzac, Simenon and Conan Doyle, Max du Veuzit and Daphné du Maurier, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Spirou and Tintin’s comic strips in the ‘Le Soir’ newspaper which was collaborating with the Nazis! It is to this woman who had neither studied nor learned to read and write that I undoubtedly owe my later career as a journalist, filmmaker, and writer. And I even owe her my professional pseudonym because Henri Roanne was the fake name on the food rations card, she had managed to get for me!

As we have seen, the creation of the Kindertransports, which led to the evacuation of more than ten thousand Jewish children from the Reich, was due to solidarity movements in England, Belgium, and a few other countries. The scale of these protests undermines the argument that many Germans were unaware of the fate of the Jews, even though it had already been proclaimed in ‘Mein Kampf’ in 1924. It makes the silence of your grandparents and great-grandparents even more appalling. The vast majority of them were, if not activists, then at least accomplices, whether out of conviction, conformity, or cowardice, to the merciless antisemitic hunt orchestrated by Adolf Hitler.

Do not blame me for this unpleasant and painful reminder. However, as a secular Jew, I cannot accept that it is dangerous and inadvisable to wear the kippah in Germany today. Like many of you, I suppose, I am frightened by the images, seen on television, of parades in several cities across the country, of thousands of far-right militants with outstretched arms, who forget, minimise or deny this past, and even reclaim it. The generations after World War II, of course, are not to blame for the crimes of Hitler’s Germany. However, as a survivor of the Kindertransports, I dare to say to you up front that the maintenance of democracy, the rejection of intolerance, the fight against fascism masked by the label of populism is more incumbent on you, the Germans, than on any other European citizens. The very significant exhibition which opened today, the remarkable research work undertaken by volunteers at the educational and memorial site, the Jawne, is a step in this direction. You are certainly helping to restore Germany's “lost honour” by at the very least offering visitors the opportunity of remembering the past.

They are not satisfied with repeating old stories: “Saved...for the time being” is a pioneering work, a warning signal and has parallels to current world events. This exhibition confronts us with the current events: Immigrants fleeing terror and misery rejected on all sides, religious intolerance, racial discrimination, children torn from their families: in Germany, as in the whole of Europe, in Africa as well as in America. We will be able to act less than ever as though we knew nothing about it....

I would like to add something to my speech: today is a day of great joy. We are here, we are all here. We have survived, we all survived: Francois survived, Adolphe survived, Marcel survived, many other survivors are here, we have started families, we have children, we have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we have written books and novels, and we have received Nobel Prizes. We have won and we will continue to win and survive. In doing so, we will win over those who claim the past for themselves. It is a great joy to be here today. Thank you to those who made this possible.”

Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt

Finissage of the exhibition on 2 February 2020

The children of Tony, Betty and Dora Steuer from the USA, who are portrayed in the exhibition, attended the finissage as guests of honour: Susan Sanders, Paul R. West, Sharon West, Debra Sanders and other relatives.

Then came the family of Anne Mannebaeck-Dressou, whose parents took in the Steuer siblings in Belgium at the beginning of 1939. Anne Mannebaeck-Dressou was accompanied by her son Maurice Mannebaeck and other family members. Maurice Mannebaeck gave a speech.

The event was accompanied by music from the Tina Orchestra from Leverkusen.