A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [32]
Hershl Silberman's family had-also prospered in Antwerp. They owned a three-story house on Simonsstraat in the heart of the diamond district. This street, which farther up changes its name to Pelikaanstraat, is long and straight and runs along the elevated train tracks to the station.
By the time Mordechai Rottenberg married Dwora and Hershl on October 29, 1941, the Germans had occupied Antwerp for almost a year and a half. Every week, Jewish life was becoming more restricted. Banks could not accept Jewish deposits. Jews could not operate stores. The traditional Orthodox wedding at night under the stars was now impossible, because Jews were not allowed outside after seven o'clock in the evening. Rabbi Rotten-berg had to make one of his rare compromises and perform the wedding ceremony during the day, inside the synagogue. Then lists of Jews who were to report to the train station for deportation to “work camps” started appearing. Dwora's parents feared for their children, because they thought that labor camps would be looking for young people. So they persuaded the newly weds to flee to France. Tens of thousands of Belgian Jews had already gone there, including Dwora's brother and his wife, who were now in Lyons. The Jewish underground could get them through the occupied zone to southern France.
But just as Hershl and Dwora were about to cross the French border, Dwora declared that she could not leave her parents, she had to go back to Antwerp, this was all a mistake. But the underground responded that they had already taken too many risks to move them and there was no turning back; she would have to wait until the war was over to return. Among the last Jews to escape Belgium, the decision was out of her hands. Yet it would torment her for the rest of her life.
Lyons was not safe, either. Dwora's brother and his wife were caught in one of the French police roundups and deported to Auschwitz. Dwora and Hershl spent the war years moving across southern France, from the Swiss to the Spanish border, looking for a place to hide.
At the time of the Liberation of France, they were in a rural area in central France. When they saw men from the FFI Resistance group take three Germans prisoner, they realized the Nazi occupation of France had ended. One of the Germans, an officer, was arguing his case to the Resistance fighters. Dwora heard him say in clear German, ‘What we did, everybody else wanted to have done. But we were the fools who got the job done.”
Seven months pregnant, Dwora immediately tried to get back to her family—she did not want to wait for the war to be over. But the Belgium border was closed, as the war moved to the Ardennes. Hershl and Dwora stood by the side of a muddy road outside Lille while the Allied army slogged toward its next rendezvous. After talking a British Army driver into giving them a ride, they arrived in Belgium in the back of his canvas-covered truck. The driver even gave them chocolate. Their first sight of Antwerp was with an orange flash across the sky, followed by an earth-shaking boom.
Although forced to retreat, the Germans had not been able to destroy the city's harbor, which was now the best undamaged port across the channel from England. They were trying to hit the city with V-l and V-2 rockets. The VI would make a tremendous noise as it streaked over the city; The V2 was silent. The anti-aircraft battery outside of town was heard, then nothing until suddenly a building blew up. The Germans never hit the port, but one day, as though guided by vengeful fate, a rocket hit the Rex Cinema while it was showing a matinee,