Johannes Blum has been conducting video interviews since 1987 with over 1,300 survivors of the concentration and extermination camps, Jewish and non-Jewish members of the resistance, hidden children and other survivors of the Holocaust. But how did he come to dedicate his life to these testimonies?
Johannes Blum was born on 23 December 1942 in Salzburg, Austria, to German parents. In 1945, his mother moved to Germany with his sister and him. Their father, however, was missing in action. Johannes Blum went to school in Germany and studied Roman philology and history at the University of Freiburg from 1965 to 1969. When Johannes met a Belgian member of the resistance in 1963, he tried to talk to his mother about the family’s attitude towards National Socialism. At that time, however, this topic was not discussed because the Germans considered themselves all to be “victims” of the Hitler regime.
Dealing with the past and encountering the first survivors
Johannes Blum found it difficult to bear the weight of such a terrible past.
The Germans kept up the image of their own victimisation without realising that others had become victims because of them. I distanced myself from this country which, for me, had crossed the red line, with Auschwitz, among other things.
(Interview Johannes Blum, article Paul Vaute, La Libre Belgique, 2003)
In 1969, Johannes Blum settled permanently in Belgium and acquired Belgian nationality. He studied German philology and history at the University of Saint-Louis in Leuven and from 1973, taught German as a grammar school teacher. From time to time he met people who had been in the resistance and became aware of their reserved attitude towards him.
In 1987, Johannes Blum got into contact with the Holocaust survivors Sonja Goldmann, Sarah Goldberg, Maryla Dyament-Michalowski and Hélène Weissberg and accompanied them to Fröndenberg in West Germany’s Sauerland for a commemoration event.
At the end of the war, the Fröndenberg company Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke maintained a branch in Auschwitz, where the concentration camp prisoners Regina Saphirstein, Alla Gärtner, Ester Weissblum, and Rosa Robota had to do forced labour. The women managed to smuggle explosives out of the factory over a long period of time and thus enabled the armed uprising of the prisoners of the “Sonderkommando” in the Crematoria III and IV in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 7 October 1944. After several months of torture, the four women resistance fighters were executed on January 6, 1945 on the Appellplatz (camp’s roll call area).
Les Compagnons de la Mémoire
Hearing the stories of these women made Johannes Blum become aware of how important it was to preserve them for future generations. In 1993, he established the organisation Les Compagnons de la Mémoire (Companions of Memory) in order to document eyewitness interviews. By recording them, publishing them and organising encounters, the organisation aimed to draw schoolchildren’s attention to the realities of yesterday and at the same time build bridges in the present.
According to Johannes Blum, the testimonies convey essential values for today and tomorrow, both for our private and public lives.
A life’s work
Over the years, Johannes Blum has conducted a large number of interviews which he considers to be his life’s work.
In 1991, he managed to have a monument erected to the Belgian rescuer Father Bruno Reynders and to track down more than 300 children hidden by him during the German occupation. In 1993, he published the book “Resistance. Père Bruno Reynders. Juste des Nations” (Resistance. Father Bruno Reynders. Righteous among Nations). In 2003, he got into contact with the Jewish Museum for Deportation and Resistance, today the Kazerne Dossin (Dossin Barracks), in Mechelen. His collection was accepted by the museum’s archive and is also kept at the Fondation Auschwitz in Brussels. The Kazerne Dossin is working at digitalising the recordings and the research data.
In 2016 Johannes Blum received the “Mensch de l’année” (“Human of the Year”) award from the Centre Communautaire Laïc Juif (Jewish Secular Community Centre) in recognition of his outstanding work. CM
