Barbara Krasner
Anderlecht
I’m sitting in the back of a Mercedes taxi in Brussels. The driver doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak French. I hand him a piece of paper with place names and addresses that I culled from Albert Hepner’s memoir, Avrumele. That’s the diminutive form of his Yiddish name. I’ve known Albert for several years now. I was discussing Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night with a student in the community college’s adjunct office. Albert came over and said, “I was a hidden child in Belgium.” I invited him to my class as a guest speaker. I bought his memoir. We started as colleagues and became friends.
Albert’s family immigrated to Belgium after World War I from Warsaw. They were in the handbag business. They became part of the 95 percent of foreign-born Jews in Belgium and an immediate target under the occupation. By the time Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Belgium along with the other Low Countries and France in the spring of 1940, Al’s father had died of natural causes. Al was six the following year when his cousin, Motl, a young doctor from Belarus and member of the Belgian resistance, put him in hiding. The places and addresses I have are the landmarks of his journey one cold, dark, November night when Albert slipped out of the church where Motl stashed him, and trekked back to his family’s apartment because he wet his sheet.
Everything now depends on the driver’s cell phone GPS and his ability to read my handwriting. We need to get to Anderlecht, one of the nineteen districts of Brussels. My plan is to retrace Albert’s steps, albeit in a cab. It is over 90 degrees Fahrenheit on this Sunday afternoon in June and there is no way I’m going to hoof it.
I could have simply asked Albert what it was like to make this journey as a six-year-old. I could have asked him how he remembered the route. What it was like to cross the heavily trafficked rue de Fiennes with its tram tracks? What to do when he reached Place Conseil, Council Square, and its massive red brick and stone Anderlecht’s Municipal Hall? How did he know to turn left off rue de Fiennes to rue Rossini and then two blocks to his home? When I emailed Albert to tell him I was making this side trip, he wrote, “I wish I were there so I could drive you to the old sites.”
The driver pulls down a narrow street. Is it a street or a path? He says, “We are here. This is the church.” I think, this can’t be the right church, because the only name of the church I can see engraved in the stone is Kerk van Onse Lieve Vrouw. What trips me up is that Albert and the Internet refer to this 1856 neo-Gothic church as Église Notre-Dame Immaculée. But the taxi driver assures me this is the right church in Brussels’ working-class Anderlecht district on rue de Meersman. I don’t know French and I don’t know Flemish, but these two names are equivalent.
Whether in French or Flemish, somewhere behind these wooden doors, is the basement dungeon as Albert called it in his memoir. There he slept in a cold room, on an iron cot with scratchy linens and blanket, and repeatedly wet the bed. He was one of several boys in hiding. Although blue eyed with curly blond hair, Albert’s circumcision would give him away as a Jew.
Somewhere behind these wooden doors, Father Jan Bruylandts, in his long, black cassock, greeted his congregation, read his prepared sermon while perhaps thinking about the Jewish boys in the building. Maybe he could still feel Albert’s hand in his, a hand hopeful, yet trembling and weary.
With the Mercedes engine idling and the meter running, I dare not venture into the church. Maybe I should have taken mass transit from city center to Anderlecht instead so I could take my time. But I know my physical limitations and how I don’t do well with heat. I snap some photos and get back to the car. We take off. It is difficult to navigate from the back seat of the taxi and more difficult to read the small rectangular street signs affixed to the buildings. They become more visible once I pass them. The church straddles the two lanes of rue Dokteur de Meersman, also known as Dokter de Meersmanstraat. We follow rue de la Clinique six long city blocks, past the once-thriving Orthodox synagogue built in the 1920s, to Place Conseil, Council Square, and its nineteenth-century massive red brick-and-stone Municipal Hall that also now houses the train station on the Brussels-South line. I know from Albert’s memoir, he made a left here onto rue de Fiennes, a highly-trafficked thoroughfare with tram lines.
I am already in awe of Albert’s midnight odyssey. We turn onto a beautiful, tree-lined boulevard, rue Bara, a street not mentioned in Avrumele. I yell out to the driver, “There’s rue Rossini!” We have to make four successive rights to get back onto rue Bara and make the right on rue Rossini. I suppose the street signs are more helpful when walking or taking a horse-drawn hack. Anderlecht blossomed in the nineteenth century to the southwest of bustling Brussels. At one time, this district served as a hub for a Jewish community. Now, given the abundance of tandoori and halal establishments, the neighborhood has shifted demographically, as neighborhoods do.
Why didn’t I think of asking Albert for his street address in Anderlecht? The memoir says Al walked two blocks from rue de Fiennes along rue Rossini to get to his apartment. But we’ve not come from rue de Fiennes, and so I don’t know which is Al’s block. All I can do is take photos of the buildings and imagine that his family’s apartment building must have looked like this: A tall and narrow row house of three or four stories, some windows featuring wrought-iron balconies.
Albert told the story of how he brought his wet sheet to the apartment, where his mother turned him away. He stood here, where I am standing now, his face reddened by constant crying, waving his wet linen, pleading with his mama to give him a dry sheet. She didn’t turn on the light. She motioned to him “Gehe vek,” go away, a message he eventually understood. He sulked back to the church and crawled back into bed, no longer concerned that Father Jan might chastise him for wetting the bed again. His mother had done far worse. Had I not traveled here, not peeked through the door of Albert’s past, I would not have been able to bear witness to the loss of a son’s trust of his mother. He never forgave her, not even after decades of therapy.
Here in this Anderlecht district, Nazi sirens burst through the night down rue de la Clinique toward the church as Motl rushed Albert through yet another doorway on rue de Fiennes for safety in hiding. Someone, maybe the laundress, betrayed the priest.
I return to my hotel room in central Brussels. I email Albert and tell him of my adventure. “I don’t know how you did it,” I write. “You were only six.” He brushes by my comment and instead focuses on my admiration of rue Bara. He responds, “You mentioned one of my favorite streets from after the war. 32 Rue Bara was where Borochov Dror was, the Zionist organization I belonged to, and got to reaffirm my Yiddishkeit. The other wonderful memory of that street, is that right across the street, Cote D’Or, was the best chocolate factory in Europe. Every time I went to a kvutza meeting, we could imbibe the chocolate aroma. Another good way to be Jewish.” In 1930, just a few years before Albert’s birth, the company had some 350 employees in Anderlecht. The company was later sold to the Swiss.
In the email exchange, something else blossoms. It’s been blossoming since I climbed into the Mercedes cab. There’s no glass barrier between the front and back seats. Al and I now share a kind of intimacy. I am bearing witness, validating his experience. I am sitting now in the front seat with him. He’s been driving me all along.
“I am so glad I had the opportunity to honor my friend’s wartime experience by retracing the steps he took while in hiding in Nazi-occupied Belgium to ask his mother for help.” —Barbara Krasner
Barbara Krasner is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her literary work has appeared in Consequence, Jewish Literary Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod International, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College.