The Blackout

The impact of war and occupation, after the big blow of the May events, are felt every day like a mass of pinpricks to be suffered and pondered. The blackout, however, has changed our way of life more thoroughly than anything we might have dreamed of only a few months ago.

In the first place, every evening we have to spend ten minutes blacking out our home. If we leave a chink visible from the street, an irate policeman will ring the bell furiously and threaten us with heavy fines. Or worse – it happened to us – a German patrol, fully armed and aggressive, will bang on the door with their rifle butts. They will enter, investigate our blackout arrangements and yell at the top of their lungs in their harshest German, terrorizing the whole family. They will then leave in a big show of clanking of rifles against their gas mask canisters and the crunching noise of their hobnailed boots.



An Air raid Alert


Sister Leona and I called on a few friends who live near the Basilica of Koekelberg. It was the hour after sunset when we came back. The pale moon was straight up overhead, three-quarters full. There was still some milky blue in the sky and only the evening star hung in the West, yellow as candlelight.

In the distance one could hear the drone of airplanes, German aircraft we assumed, on their way to bomb London. Or rather, as the sound of the heavy throb of the bombers was approaching, aircraft coming back from England. Suddenly, without warning, searchlights start to cross the sky in stiff awkward arcs, plunging thousands of feet in the air, each terminating in a kind of nebulous mist. The anti-aircraft guns start to blaze away with every once of energy they can muster. The noise mingled with the sorrowful wail of the siren announcing, belatedly, an air raid, was hideous.

The lightning and crack of explosions right above her heads make us beat a hasty retreat into the recess of a deep doorway. A few seconds later we can hear the clatter of shrapnel on the roof followed by a shower of fragments bouncing at our feet in spectacular display of sparks. I ring the bottom bell of our shelter but no one answers. A few minutes later the cannonade ceases as abruptly as it started. Impassive, the RAF planes continue on their way to Germany…



The Hounding of the Jews


The Nazis come in the middle of the night and order the Jews to get out of their house or apartment immediately. Only one suitcase with the bare necessities is allowed for the trip. Everything else has to stay behind.

They have to “voluntarily” renounce any claim on their house, in writing, and they are led to the freight station for “shipment”. At the station each of the deportees are given a piece of cardboard with their name and number to wear around the neck. They are subject to a thorough body search and all money, jewelry, even photographs and little mementoes as well as any provisions brought along are taken from them.

Before daybreak the SS shove then brutally unto the train waiting to take them to an unknown destination in the East.

And what happens to those Jews in those camps?

Persistent rumors have it that the “arbeitsfähig” (fit for work), young men and women, are directed to labor camps and the others, women with children and older people, are killed sometimes within hours of their arrival at destination.

Can this be true? Or is just rumors? One thing is sure: among the thousands upon thousands of deported Jews, not one has come back, not one has written a letter or even a postcard. They have all disappeared in Nacht und Nebel: Night and Fog.



Death of a little Angel


There had been a heavy bombing of the Schaarbeek train complex in the afternoon and as a member of the Civil Defense, I joined a team of heavy rescue workers .We are directed to a the boulevard where a bomb has collapsed a group of stately mansions.

We are told that some people are trapped beneath the huge debris. Our leader calls for silence as to better hear the muffled cries which should lead us to the victims. After a few minutes we do indeed hear the faint moaning under a heap of rubble at the house second from left. After removal a pile of loose stone and brick we could hear more clearly the voice of a woman calling for help. We dig further and find that she is trapped with her little girl under the collapsed concrete roof of the cellar. Despite our efforts, for lack of adequate equipment, we do not succeed in extracting mother and child from their perilous situation.

We continue our digging and clearing but it is difficult and perilous. We keep talking to the mother, very brave, but her voice is faltering and we fear for her and her daughter.

At long last there comes the heavy rescue team. These professionals negotiate the wreckage with care and yet with amazing speed. In less than thirty minutes they extract the mother with broken limbs and in very bad shape. It takes longer to get the child out. Life has departed from her; her eyes and lips are puffed, she has suffocated to death. A little curly angel, innocent of war’s crimes and tragedies, has paid and gone to heaven.

I carry her limp in my arms, a featherweight, down the broken ruins to the waiting doctor hastily summoned. He confirms what I already knew: she is dead. I burst into tears, inconsolable, as she is taken to the makeshift morgue. It is not my first encounter with death but it is my first battle with death and my first defeat at the hands of the Angel of Death…



The long wait for Freedom is over


Except for a few towns around the mouth of the River Scheldt, all of Belgium has been liberated. I therefore wish to end this diary: the long wait for freedom is over.

At dusk, I take my bike and head for the Chaussée Romaine, the Roman Road, as I did in early August, 1940.The September moon, mellow and golden, rises down on us with a weird effect. At this hour, a melancholy silence reigns undisturbed. The plane trees struggle up the gentle hillside forming patches of intense gloom. Soon darkness reigns supreme in this secluded spot.

Now, if ever, the martyred souls of the present war, joined by the ghosts of long gone invading armies, quit their tombs to haunt the scene of their last earthly pilgrimage…