I came across a list of Germans who were honored at Yad Vashem for having saved Jews from death by the Nazis. That reminded me of the two members of the Gestapo who let me escape the fate of millions of Jews who were sent to the concentration camps.
I would like to add two members of the Gestapo; unfortunately, I do not have their names.
I was born in Berlin, in 1929. Nine years later my parents smuggled the family out of Germany into Belgium. They applied for a visa to the United States, but the German invasion prevented us from leaving.
By the summer of 1942 the family went into hiding. I was 14, in hiding with the Paauwels family who lived in a working-class community of attached family houses on the outskirts of Anderlecht (Brussels), called Bon Air, where I had an encounter with the Gestapo.
Mr. Paauwels and son worked for the railway. The father worked in Brussels, the son had been sent to Germany to work in a railway yard. Mrs. Paauwels was home raising Pekinese dogs, keeping the garden and also keeping three Jewish kids. Besides myself there were two siblings, younger than I, from Hungary, which was at the time still an ally of Germany.
One afternoon, the doorbell rang and, upon opening the door, two men in civilian clothes and leather trench coats entered the house and announced that they were Gestapo. They also announced that “Oh yes, here we have the Jewish children in hiding.” They asked for our names but then addressed the lady of the house, Mrs. Paauwels, and after talking to her for a few minutes they took her upstairs where the bedrooms were located.
After a while they came back down with Mrs. Paauwels, announced that they would be back in the morning (standard procedure) and went back to their car and left.
Mrs. Paauwels told us that they looked behind picture frames, under the bed and any other possible hiding place, but did not find anything. Months later, the family figured out that the Gestapo agents were looking for a radio transmitter.
A group of Belgian railroaders working in Germany, including the son, were given five days leave to go home. As it took them three days to reach Brussels, they decided to stay three days with their family and only then return to Germany.
While they were gone, the Allies extensively bombed the railway yard where they worked. Upon his return, the son was jailed, questioned and tortured.
The Gestapo agents who came to his parents’ house were counterespionage agents looking for the radio they thought had been used to pass information to the Allies about the activities at the railway yard. The son was under suspicion of spying for the Allies.
They did not take me [and the other Jewish children] along to be turned in. I always asked myself, “Why not?”
The only reason I could find was that they were not anti-Semitic.
