After a very active life, both professionally and privately, Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt started to deal with his life story. He reflects on his survival as a child and how this experience shaped his later life.
The Kindertransport
Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt remembers his trip from Vienna to Brussels in March 1939 75 years later:
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 in doubt, they barked, “Dein Name?” (Your name?)
(Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, “Le cinéma de Saul Birnbaum”, Chapter 7, p. 33 ff., 16 March 2013, Genèse Editions)
The Brussels Raids
While Hans lived in Brussels with a Belgian Jewish foster family, he experienced the first big raid in September 1942 with them:
We lived in an area of Anderlecht, where many Jewish families lived at that time. A big raid took place. The Germans systematically arrested all the Jews they could find in the Rue Brogniez. However, despite their efforts to be systematic, they left out a small square set back from the street where two or three Jewish families were living. From the apartment we heard everything: the screaming, the barking of the dogs, the crying of babies....
(Interview with Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, 14 March 2007, p. 8)
The Hiding Place in the Rue Saxe Cobourg, Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode
After the raids in 1942, the boy, still named Hans, moved to Marthe van Doren’s home. She hid him for two years in the back rooms of her laundry and took care of his education:
She was quite simply a courageous woman who had neither studied nor learned to read and write. I was given an extraordinary opportunity because this woman went to a public library to get me books. Since she wasn’t very educated, she brought me many different books, randomly selected and generally intended for adults. Because of this I learned so very many things in a very heterogeneous and chaotic way.
(Interview with Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, 14 March 2007, p. 10)
After the Liberation: Reflection – Looking back on a Life
The education that Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt received while in hiding was the basis for his later career as a journalist:
Reading gave me the opportunity to become integrated and to develop. It certainly helped me to find a vision or at least an access to the world that I would not have had in such an environment and with all that was going on – and that is perhaps the irony of things.... Nothing would have come of this if reading hadn’t been my only hobby.
(Interview with Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, 14 March 2007, p. 25)