‘Disabled sister saved me from Holocaust’

If it weren’t for Armand Schmidt’s disabled sister, there would be little chance that he would have survived World War II. 

This is because before Schmidt was born, his sister was already in a Catholic residential children’s care institution, the Institut de l’Enfant Jésus in Belgium. 

Schmidt told the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre on 16 September on his first-ever visit to South Africa that though he had never met his sister, as she died soon after he was born, if it hadn’t been for her, he didn’t know where he would be today. 

“If not for this handicapped child, most probably I would have gone to France, or she would have put me in other places where there were many Jewish children,” he said. 

Schmidt said that before he was born and his family was living in Antwerp, Belgium, his father, Markus Schmidt, was one of 12 000 Jews in Belgium given a work deployment order, which would ultimately lead to him being on the 17th convoy leaving Belgium, where he would be deported to Auschwitz. 

Schmidt said he and the rest of his family never discovered what actually happened to him, just that he was deported as they have documentation that he was on that convoy. 

This meant that even before Schmidt was born, his mother was left in an impossible situation. She was pregnant, alone, not knowing where her husband was, and had a handicapped daughter, all set against the background of major raids happening on Jewish homes in Antwerp in 1942. 

That’s when his mother decided to send his sister, Rachel, to the Institut de l’Enfant Jésus, before Schmidt was born, so that she could be safe while Schmidt was with his mother as a newborn. 

Then in 1943, Schmidt’s mother got a knock on her door from the Gestapo, coming to arrest her, and possibly send her and Schmidt to their death. 

“They told her to get ready, and after she left the room, she did some quick thinking, and in that time, she was able to escape the Gestapo with a baby,” he said. 

She then went into hiding, and part of that process was to leave her newborn child. This was when she approached the institution where her other child was kept, asking them to help her hide her son, and since his sister was there at the time, it allowed for a bending of the rules. 

“She came there. She knocked on the door, and asked to speak to the director of this institution, saying, ‘Here I have a child, please take care of my baby,’” he said. “I don’t know what the reaction was to this, that she was alive. Did she say yes immediately? Did she say, ‘Sorry, I have to think about it?’ Did she have to talk to other people? But the thing is, she said yes. She accepted me. I wasn’t the right age to be there, and I wasn’t handicapped, but I spent the first three years of my life there.” 

While Schmidt was living in this institution, his mother was living and working for a lawyer in Brussels under a false name. However, she tried to get to the institution to visit her son as often as she could. 

“In this institution, parents visited their children. When they knew it was a Sunday when parents were coming to visit, they asked my mother not to come. That was really the risk. The risk wasn’t so much from the people there, but the parents who came, saw the child, and asked, ‘What is he doing here? Who is he?’ That was a big risk,” he said. 

While he was in the institution, he had everything he could wish for, he said – a place to play, a garden, toys, and people who cared for him. 

“There was one woman, her name was Leontyne. She was a simple woman who worked in the kitchen, as far as I know and she didn’t have children. For her, I was always ‘mon gamin’, which means ‘my boy’,” he said. 

Schmidt said that while in the institution, although the sisters loved and cared for him, they always made sure that he knew that he had a mother waiting for him. 

“In all the years that I was there, between February 1943 and January 1946, there was a correspondence between my mother and one sister there, Sister Veronique. She always wrote letters or postcards to my mother, talking about me. I read well and I had a good time. Although she never said anything about the war, she made allusions to it by saying, ‘En paix sans ombre’ [In peace without shadow]. And she made allusions to a ‘situation difficile’ – ‘according to your difficult situation’,” he said. 

Although his mother never replied to these postcards, she kept all 50 of them, even going as far as to scratch out the stamp of the institution so that nobody would find out that he was there. 

When the war ended in 1945, Schmidt’s mother found her way back to her son, and they continued to live in Belgium, however she never spoke about what had happened to her during the war. 

“She wasn’t one to remember all the events. The only time she told stories was when we went to Israel in 1950, on a family visit, they asked questions about her. Then she talked about it. But she preferred not to speak about it.”