Brussels 1942: 6-month-old Jacques Weisser BEM is hidden in children's homes & hospitals. His father is forced to become an Organisation Todt slave labourer. His mother is deported to Malines & murdered in Auschwitz.

I should've delved more into it, asking questions. But most of the time after the war I wasn't with my father. When I was he never wanted to talk about it.

'It was what it was, we survived, we made a life for ourselves'. That's what he'd say. He refused to be interviewed by the Shoah Foundation. Maybe being on camera wasn’t his thing.

My father was already gone when my mother was taken in the street. The question is, who was I with during that period? Who looked after me for a few days before putting me in this Meisjeshuis [children's home]?

It’s a blank. Nobody can tell, nobody knows & I have no memories. There's nobody to ask any more & no records. In my understanding my given name would be 'Salomon Weisser'. Subsequently 'Jacques' became my nom de guerre but in the Jewish orphanage, they misspelt my name & got my birth of date wrong. That's why the research has been so hard.

In Belgium there were a lot of children that were somehow saved in one shape, form or another. There was quite a decent underground. A lot of them were Jewish communists, including my uncle, Chaim Weisser. He was responsible for Charleroi. His son was also a hidden child.

In August 1944 German officials decided to send the last orphans to Malines. The Belgian resistance hid the children instead. Jacques was hidden in the Ardennes with a boy called Bill.

Many years later I found the lady who was involved in hiding in me in the Ardennes. I found her name, Mme Wittamer. I managed to make an appointment to see her but she never turned up. I subsequently learnt that she’d married & never told her husband that she’d hidden a child during the war.

My father says that when he found me she didn't want to give me up. A lot of them didn't. She wanted to keep this child. He never talked about her either, which again I found subsequently difficult to understand because it was the last step, if you like, in the life story of being alive.

The Resistance put me with her in the Ardennes. And, for whatever reason, no information of any kind from any of the family, apart from the fact that they may have met her once. Not from my father, not from my stepmother, not from anybody.

That in a way hurts because that would have been [sighs]—it would have been good. To close the circle I suppose. I only know her first name because there is a card that was found. Her name was Wittamer.

For many years I had photos of me, I knew it was me but where they came from, where they were taken, I had no idea. One of them gives my name on the back of one of the photos: 'souvenir de Jacqui'. Who wrote it, no idea. There's so many different layers—the puzzle, you know, trying to find the bits & pieces, it’s complicated, complex.

Jacques' father was liberated by US soldiers in the forest of Waldenburg.

He came to Brussels. In those days “the place to go to” when you came back was the station, always the railway station. There he met somebody he knew who told him: don't bother going to Antwerp, nothing there for you anymore, your wife died, your brother has survived. We believe your son is alive.

So my understanding is he found where I was, through the Red Cross. He found me, he says in Virton but maybe in Esch-en-Raphaël, & brought me back to Brussels, met his wife-to-be, my stepmother, & his life carried on from there, as did mine.

Jacques Weisser BEM

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter