Know much about Belgium?? I'm pretty clueless about the place, but it appears that Belgians were the least anti-Semitic people during WWII.
I got this from a book review in Kirkus of The Twentieth Train by Marion Schreiber. It's mainly the story of a Jewish doctor in Brussels, Youra Livchitz, who was forced out of work by occupying Germany. He began working in the Belgian rebel underground, and eventually he masterminded the raid/takeover of a train carrying Belgian Jews to Auschwitz. All 240 occupants of the train escaped, hidden by Belgian Catholic families, and not one was ever caught. Sadly, a Russian double-agent snitched on Livchitz, though, and he was executed by firing squad. He refused a blindfold, asking to look into the sunrise as a symbol of hope.
The item I found most noteworthy in the review is this statistic-- 60 percent of Belgian Jews survived the Holocaust, as opposed to 12 percent of Dutch Jews (it says here that other European countries's numbers also fall around that level).
From Schreiber's text: Most Belgians rejected the brutal methods that the German occupying forces used against the Jews. Especially in Brussels and Wallonia, the population proved to be largely immune to the poison of National Socialist racial hatred.
I got this from a book review in Kirkus of The Twentieth Train by Marion Schreiber. It's mainly the story of a Jewish doctor in Brussels, Youra Livchitz, who was forced out of work by occupying Germany. He began working in the Belgian rebel underground, and eventually he masterminded the raid/takeover of a train carrying Belgian Jews to Auschwitz. All 240 occupants of the train escaped, hidden by Belgian Catholic families, and not one was ever caught. Sadly, a Russian double-agent snitched on Livchitz, though, and he was executed by firing squad. He refused a blindfold, asking to look into the sunrise as a symbol of hope.
The item I found most noteworthy in the review is this statistic-- 60 percent of Belgian Jews survived the Holocaust, as opposed to 12 percent of Dutch Jews (it says here that other European countries's numbers also fall around that level).
From Schreiber's text: Most Belgians rejected the brutal methods that the German occupying forces used against the Jews. Especially in Brussels and Wallonia, the population proved to be largely immune to the poison of National Socialist racial hatred.
I took a class from Nils Skov, one of the early members of the Dutch resistance.
His book Letter to My Descendants{/i} is very good, especially considering the chapters alternate between his experience and the war as a whole for two different narratives.