Hans Rosenblatt was born on 16 April 1932 in Vienna; he was not yet six years old when, on 13 March 1938, he experienced first-hand the Anschluss, Austria’s annexation to the National Socialist German Reich.
Hans’ father, Adolf Rosenblatt, was born on 17 October 1910 in Trybuchowicie, Poland. He worked in Vienna in the shop run by his father, Wolf Rosenblatt. His mother, Lea Rosenblatt (née Ginsberg), born on 8 February 1913 in Jezierzany, Poland, felt attracted to the Jewish labour movement and to Zionism. Hoping to protect her from the growing antisemitism in Poland, her parents sent her to Vienna in 1930.
There she married her distant cousin Adolf Rosenblatt in 1931 in an arranged marriage. In 1938 they lived at 3 Spitzackergasse in the 17th district. Shortly after the Anschluss, the Gestapo arrested Hans’ father. On 31 May 1938 he was interned in the Dachau concentration camp and taken to Buchenwald on 22 September 1938.
Lea Rosenblatt tried to obtain foreign visas but received only one for her husband. After his release from the camp on 21 April 1939 (at that time it was still possible to be released from the camp under certain circumstances), Adolf immediately emigrated to England. There he joined the British army, which gave him a new identity, Ardy Rutherford. After the war he started a new family.
Kindertransport
Following Adolf’s arrest, Lea Rosenblatt, alone and destitute, decided to entrust her only child to a Kindertransport to Belgium. On 6 March 1939 Hans left Vienna in Train no. 146, wearing the number 113, as he later learned from documents. One day later he arrived in Herbesthal at 5.50 pm along with 136 other children. In Brussels, Hans was taken in by the Jewish couple David and Hanna Dorn, née Birnbaum, as arranged by his uncle, Samuel Rosenblatt.
The German occupation and the raids
In May 1940, the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) invaded Belgium. Life became more and more difficult. On 3 September 1942, the Dorn family escaped the first major raid in Brussels with Hans: their slightly set-back house was miraculously overlooked by the Germans. Then they had to leave their home and go into hiding.
The hiding place and the change of identity
For two years a Catholic neighbour, Marthe van Doren, hid Hans in her laundry room. She provided him with a fake meal card in the name of Henri Roanne, an identity he later retained as a pseudonym. Martha brought books from the municipal library to entertain him. Henri educated himself by reading books by many different authors and many adult books. After the liberation, he returned to the Dorn family. When he went back to school, he was able to skip several classes because he had acquired a lot of knowledge.
Reunion with his mother
Lea Rosenblatt went illegally from Austria to Italy and then to France in 1939 where she was arrested because she was considered a German spy. After the invasion of France, she hid in Cahors until the end of the war. She did not see her son again until 1945, after six years of separation. He refused to live with her again, but they remained in contact until her death.
Professional and private life after the war
Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt (as he would later call himself) married three times, had three children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He became extremely successful in his professional career as a journalist and producer at the Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (Radio Television Frankophone Belgium, RTBF), board member of the Royal Belgian Film Library, film critic, film director (“China 1971”, “Moi Tintin” [Me Tintin]) and writer (“La vie cachée de Tintin” [The hidden life of Tintin], “Le cinéma de Saül Binbaum” [The cinema of Saül Binbaum]). Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, now 92 years old, still lives in Brussels with his wife Gladys Bazin from Haiti. CM
Portrait of Hans Rosenblatt/Henri Roanne: © Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt