review

Tamara Deutscher

A Jew in Wartime Belgium

The death of Marcel Liebman in March of this year has deprived us of

a major twentieth-century historian whose roots lay in classical Marxism
untainted by leaden orthodoxies or passing fashions. Born in 1929 in
Brussels, Liebman was educated in the Belgian capital and at the London
School of Economics, subsequently becoming professor of political
science at Brussels University where he had a circle of devoted followers.
But the number of students whom he helped to understand the social
realities of the world around them is far greater than any seat of learning
could ever accommodate.
Liebman is known to readers of New Left Review mainly as the author
of several important works analysing the development of the Soviet
Union. His volume on The Russian Revolution, published in 1967, was
translated into various languages including English (Cape, 1970). This
was followed by Leninism under Lenin (Cape, 1975), for which he was
awarded the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. This remarkable re-
evaluation of the subject provoked a great deal of discussion as it led
the author to original conclusions on the origins of Stalinism. Les
Socialistes Belges (Brussels 1979), Liebman’s ambitious large-scale work
on the history of the Belgian Socialist movement, remains unfinished.
But the one published volume, covering the years 1885–1914, offers an
unrivalled account, throbbing with life, of the revolt of a class which
gradually acquired organizational forms for further social struggles.
Liebman’s Né Juif* is a fragment of an autobiography which deals with
the years from 1939 to 1945. The Liebmans were a middle-class Jewish-
Belgian family established in Brussels which observed traditional cus-
toms and religious rites. The father, a fervent Belgian patriot, had been
interned by the Germans in 1914; law-abiding and conservative, he
hated the Soviet Union because it ‘rejected God’ and ‘the idea of the
Motherland’. When the Second World War broke out, Marcel was ten
and his brothers were three, eight and twelve years old.
The first two years of the war were difficult but bearable. Then, in 1941

* Ne Juif, une famille juive pendant la guerre, Duculot, Paris 1977.

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the occupying authorities set up the Association of Belgian Jews
(Judenrat), which consisted of prominent and affluent businessmen
presided over by the Grand Rabbi. This collaborationist institution was
charged with supplying the Germans with a register of all Jews resident
in Belgium and subsequently with organizing what was euphemistically
termed ‘emigration’—in reality, mass deportations, first to the so-
called labour camps and later to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The
Association in a way relieved the occupying power of some of its dirty
administrative work and lulled the victims’ vigilance by presenting the
recruitment as a duty which only cowards wanted to shirk. Up to
1942 thirteen thousand Jews were deported, and most of them went
‘voluntarily’ following the Association’s instructions.
When the call-up papers were presented to Marcel and his brother,
Liebman senior finally lost his already somewhat shaken faith in the
activities of the Association and (although the boys were ready to go)
decided that they should disobey the order. This, however, meant that
the family had to live in hiding. There followed months and months
of terrible poverty and hunger, of all-pervading fear of denunciation,
of constant search for a safe refuge. Two cousins were taken away from
their home by the Gestapo; the 14-year-old Henri was caught, never to
return; the family had to split up; the children were hidden in a convent.
Finally, Marcel and his younger brother found shelter in a colony for
sick children run by the Workers’ Organization of Christian Youth.
Even from there the Gestapo managed to carry off a handful of helpless
Jewish boys. The resident Jesuit priests studiously refrained from any
proselytizing, yet the prevailing atmosphere of tolerance and good will
deepened Marcel’s religious conviction to such a degree that he even
took a (short-lived!) decision to become a rabbi.
This tragic story of a Jewish family under Nazi occupation is intensely
moving and told with great restraint. It also gives some insight into
the author’s trajectory from religious upbringing to socialist commit-
ment and into the influences which formed the future Marxist historian
of the Russian revolution and the socialist movement, and the defender
of the Palestinian cause. But the main value of the book lies in its
remarkable class analysis of the Jewish community. For Liebman the
Jews did not form an undifferentiated mass of Nazi victims. ‘If to be a
Jew was the worst misfortune, to be a poor Jew was to be sentenced
to annihilation.’ Many a rich Jew had the means to emigrate, to pay
those who would risk hiding him for financial gain, to pay ransom
through the ‘good offices’ of the Association, and finally even to do
good business out of the black market (provided it was on a large scale).
Like no other writer, Liebman explores in depth the question: why did
the great mass of Jews offer so little resistance? They did not lack
courage. But it was the courage of sacrifice, of martyrdom, not that of
which fighters are made. They were victims of barbarism, but also of
the religious philosophy which taught that they were the Chosen People
destined by God to centuries of suffering. They obeyed God gladly and
sought consolation in passive messianic dreams: ‘the Almighty has sent
us here . . . we are therefore happy . . . we are to be envied’, wrote a
Jewish cleric in a letter from a camp.
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The reason for the passivity of Jews less deeply mired in religious
mysticism was their respect for authority. Living as strangers, on the
margin of society, in an environment which, not without reason, they
perceived as potentially hostile, the middle-class Jews had, to an even
greater degree than their non-Jewish counterparts, inculcated in them
the great virtues of law-abidingness. The Grand Rabbi, who assures the
Gestapo officer that he understands his instructions (‘Yes, perfectly,
Herr Doktor’) and ‘clicks his heels’ is a most painful example of
submission and deference to authority.
There was Jewish resistance, however, and its form and shape provide
striking confirmation of Liebman’s general social analysis. The Jews
could fight effectively only in cooperation with, and assisted by, native
anti-fascists. As a counterweight to the essentially right-wing Associ-
ation of Belgian Jews, a left-wing Committee for the Defence of the
Jews was formed on the joint initiative of a Jewish Communist militant
and a Catholic Belgian journalist. This organization, shunned at the
beginning even by Jewish Social Democrats (the Bund) because of its
Communist connections, saved innumerable lives, prevented thousands
from being deported. Over 2,500 children owed it their lives. It was
instrumental in placing the Liebman boys, and many others, in the
Christian colony for sick children; it carried out a mock raid on a
convent and ‘kidnapped’ children who were in danger of being seized
by the Gestapo in spite of the nuns’ efforts to conceal them. Its
armed wing was also responsible for acts of sabotage which demanded
considerable courage.
Not by accident, it was in the industrial centre of Charleroi that the
Jews formed a ‘Solidarity’ group. Mostly small shopkeepers, artisans
and industrial workers, with hardly any members of the bourgeoisie,
they belonged to the local community in Charleroi. They were politically
aware, had close contacts with the native working class, with Belgian
socialist and communist parties, and with the trade unions. They knew
the meaning of class struggle, were never mesmerized by the power
and magic of Authority and were not prey to messianic dreams. In co-
operation with their ‘Aryan’ comrades they managed to cheat the
German administration of a great number of its potential victims.
Charleroi became the safest city in Belgium.
If the war years had the taste of hemlock, the liberation tasted of gall.
Those few Jews who returned from hiding were received with icy
indifference; the new tenants of their homes were unwilling to move
out, and debts incurred under extreme duress or under the threat of
denunciation were inexorably extracted by court orders. When Marcel
returned to school, no classmate bothered to ask about the fate of his
brother. Henri, like the great mass of Jews, had not perished only as a
result of the dementia of anti-semitism. He had also been the victim of
capitalism, which had done nothing to stop Nazism when there was
still time, and had indeed supported it as a shield against the ‘Red Peril’.
It seemed as if the horrors of war contaminated the peace; as if the
terrible sickness of the oppressors infected the victims. In 1967, during
the Six Days War in the Middle East, Marcel Liebman took up the
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cause of the Arabs. In response the Zionist squads threatened him and
his family with violence; he was denounced as a traitor, and the cry
‘You should have died in Auschwitz’ showed the ultimate degradation
of his accusers.

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