A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [31]
But look who had survived! Sam Perl could not help but be amazed. So many of the strong young people were gone. There seemed to be almost no teenagers at all. But there were old people, even elderly people who had seemed weak even before the war. Great leaders, like the Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, were gone. And yet people Perl had always thought of as “complete shlimazels,” the kind of people to whom everything always happened, had survived. “Who in a million years would have thought it?” he asked himself.
He would always remember this moment when Darwin's theory of natural selection did not apply, when survival had its own random force. “Life is selfish. It can't end. It's not a matter of what is driving you,” he thought. “There have to be some people who survive.” There was also the remarkable fact that he was one of them. A few people he knew had come back, like Rabbi Rotten-berg's sons, Chaim and Jozef, whom he had not seen since the transit camp, when their sister got them South American papers. Sam Perl was put on a train to Auschwitz. He jumped off, but it took the Germans only a few months to find him again. Before they put him on a second train to Auschwitz, the chief of the Gestapo had had him brought to an office where they spent several hours applying the lit end of cigarettes and cigars to the sensitive areas of his body. The second time Sam Perl was deported, he jumped off the train again, and this time he had been able to find a network of Flemish Catholics in the town of Namur, who hid him until the Liberation.
Slowly, more Jews returned. It was not going to be like before the war, but a few hundred were turning up from the safe corners they had found in France and Switzerland and New York, where in the intervening years they had built up the diamond business on Forty-seventh Street.
ANTWERP BECAME an important Jewish center in the late nineteenth century, when pogroms had driven Jews out of Eastern Europe. As major diamond deposits were discovered in the Belgian Congo, the diamond trade flourished in Antwerp, predominantly in the hands of Jews from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania. During the First World War most of the trade had been lost to Amsterdam, since Belgium was at war while Holland was neutral. But in the 1920s and 1930s Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Dutch border, started getting back its diamond trade, fed by a steady Jewish immigration from the east.
Jews were coming to Belgium not only because of its liberal immigration laws, but also because Antwerp had a port with ships bound for America and Palestine. Mia Lehmann had gone there to leave for Palestine. But once they arrived, many Jews in transit decided to stay, because there was work available in diamonds. You could become a sawer, someone who cut rough diamonds in two. Or you could become a cleaver, who cut the basic facets that determine a diamond's shape. Or if you were not good with your hands but gifted at commerce, you could become a broker, buying and selling rough stones. None of these jobs required a great deal of knowledge or education. A cleaver, one of the standard entry jobs in the diamond business, apprenticed for one year, then earned more money than many doctors.
By the outbreak of World War II, the great majority of Antwerp's more than fifty thousand Jews were earning their living in the diamond trade. It was a religious community dominated by devout Orthodox Jews from the east, many of them members of the emotional and flamboyant Hasidic movement. In the early twentieth century the Orthodox community in Antwerp was modifying and modernizing—not drastically, but enough to worry some of the traditionalists from Poland. So to maintain the old ways, they sent for a Hasidic rabbi from Katowice who had a reputation for unerring orthodoxy. The rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, arrived in 1912 with his wife, six sons, and three daughters.
Rottenberg was a rabbi of considerable energy and charisma, and he kept the religious community not only together