Bernhard Szleper, born on 6 June 1930, grew up in Cologne’s Griechenmarkt district, which had been a hub for numerous Jewish families from Eastern Europe since the beginning of the 20th century. The merchant Lajb Szleper from Kalisch (Poland) and his wife Mirl Szleper, née Horowitz, from Husjatyn (Poland, today Ukraine) had also emigrated to Cologne in 1922 and moved into a four-room apartment at 47 Thieboldsgasse.
After the November pogrom and after being thrown out of their apartment, they decided to flee to Belgium. Their son Bernhard was able to leave Germany with a Kindertransport organised by the Comité d’Assistance aux Enfants Juifs Réfugiés (Assistance Committee to Jewish Refugee Children, CAEJR) in Brussels. On 22 February 1939, he arrived at Herbesthal railway station together with 111 other Jewish children. A few weeks later, Lajb and Mirl Szleper also managed to escape to Belgium. At 362 Chausée d´Anvers in Brussels, the family was reunited and tried to find their feet with support from friends. After the German occupation of Belgium in May 1940, however, they were again subjected to persecution.
Because of the ongoing “cent jours de la déportation” (100 days of deportation), which led to the arrests and deportations of numerous Jewish immigrants between August and October 1942, the Szlepers, too, went into hiding.
By September 1943 at the latest his parents decided they had to separate from their son and placed him in the care of Henry Reynders – Père Bruno. The Catholic priest was the head of a rescue network for Jewish children. For the thirteen-year-old Bernhard Szleper, an incredible odyssey began, which showed not only the immense pressure of persecution by the German occupiers, but also how deeply rooted and extensive the rescue resistance was in the Belgian population.
Using the pseudonym Bernard Smets, he initially went into hiding in church institutions. With the support of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (Young Christian Workers) under Father Antoon de Breucker, the Comité de Défense des Juifs (Jewish Defense Committee, CDJ), the resistance fighter Gustave Collet and especially Abbé Joseph André from Namur, Bernhard was hidden in places like the Saint-Joseph monastery in Aalbeke, the children’s home in Leffe and the boarding school of the Salesians St. Paul in Melles-lez-Tournai. In ten months, he had to change hiding places eight times.
In July 1944, he finally found a safe hiding place with Lucien-Fernand and Maria Timsonet in Sclayn (Namur Province). To explain his presence and his accent, he was introduced as Bernard de Clercq, a Dutch relative from Maria Timsonet’s family.
After the end of the war, Bernhard Szleper, as well as other hidden children, were accommodated in the Home de l’Ange run by the St. Jean Baptist congregation of Abbé Joseph André. In March 1947, he and his mother, who had survived deportation and imprisonment in the camps, moved once again into an apartment in the Chausée d´Anvers in Brussels. Bernhard’s father Lajb Szleper was deported with his wife on the 24th transport from the Mechelen transit camp to Auschwitz on 4 April 1944 and did not come back.
In March 1958, Bernhard Szleper married Hélène Zélicki from Ixelles. In 1971, he became a Belgian citizen. He died in Brussels on 1 November 2017. AS
Portrait of Bernhard Szleper: © Family Bernhard Szleper