A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [62]
Alex explained the story he had learned in his Christian Bible school. He was very proud of the print because he had won it for doing well in arithmetic. Isaac, not knowing what he should do, returned to Rotterdam and settled in with Uncle Pete and his wife. Peacetime was very hard on Uncle Pete. He drank a lot of beer, argued a great deal with his wife, and reminisced with his old gang. All the beer and reminiscing led to an idea—to hit one last bank. They had gotten good at their work, but had neglected to ever keep any of the money for themselves. Why not do just one last job for themselves? The idea grew until it became irresistible. The robbery went as smoothly as it always had in wartime, and they would have gotten away with it had the government not decided to change the currency. Wartime money, it was announced, would no longer be legal tender but was redeemable at a portion of its value for new guilders. Uncle Pete, sitting on a fortune in stolen wartime guilders, thought it was worth some risk, and he turned the cash in for new guilders. But the stolen money had registered serial numbers. He was sentenced to a year in prison and lost his job with the insurance company.
Isaac moved to the le-Ezrath Ha-jeled Orphanage and found the boys who would be his family for the rest of his life. His one blood relative, Alex, could have joined them, and then he would truly have had a family and a home. But Alex's foster parents would not let him go.
Child custody cases like Alex's were being fought throughout Western Europe. The most famous of them was the Finaly case in France. The directress of a Grenoble municipal nursery had sheltered ten Jewish children during the war, then decided to keep two boys whose parents had been deported and killed, in spite of the fact that a surviving aunt wanted them back. When the Grenoble court ruled in favor of the family, the nursery directress enlisted the help of a Basque priest in kidnapping the boys and taking them to Spain. The case became what is known in France as “an affair”— an issue argued daily in the press. Some thought the Jews were being ungrateful after Catholics had risked their lives to save Jewish children. The Catholic Church asserted that the boys had been baptized and were therefore under Church authority. The Cardinal Primate and the Grand Rabbi entered into negotiations, and the children were eventually returned from Spain. But the debate never really stopped until the aunt finally took the two boys and moved them to her home in Israel.
In Antwerp a committee that included Sam Perl and Jozef Rot-tenberg had a list of forty Jewish Holocaust orphans who were being held in Belgian Catholic institutions that would not release them. Many of these children were like Alex Lipschits in that they were so young that they had little memory of being Jewish or of having another family. Some of them were older, such as two teenage girls in a Catholic convent whom Sam Perl tried to relocate. He helped one to move in with relatives in the United States. The other girl refused to leave. She was 19, her entire family had been killed in concentration camps, and she now considered herself a Christian. “I have nothing to do with Jews,” she angrily told Perl. He left her his address in Antwerp in case she ever changed her mind.
One afternoon six months later, Perl was surprised to see the girl walk into the Jewish agency with tear-shined eyes and a small suitcase in one hand. He asked her what was wrong. She and a Flemish boy had decided to get married, she told him, and he had taken her to meet his