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The Belgian Delegation
Written Message
The Stockholm International Forum (26-28 January 2000)History and Rememberance of the Shoah in Belgium

1. The democratic scope of commemorating the genocide
According to the Shoah memorial report, the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Nazi death camps were remarkable - and not simply because the Belgian authorities decided to participate. The event was also noteworthy insofar as it symbolized the fresh impetus given to the duty to remember, a duty that is shared by all concentration camp survivors, Jews and others, and by the democratic parties, all of whom are equally concerned by the worrying political evolution.

During the 1990s, the extreme right, relying on a less recent electoral base in other EU countries, made its entry in the Belgian political landscape. A definitely more worrying factor is the radicalisation of small groups in other countries, coupled with the resurgence of often extremely violent racism, in particular anti-Semitism, as well as hostility towards more recently immigrated communities through physical attacks, cemetery vandalism, invective graffiti,...

In this context, where concerted action on a European level is required, the Belgian authorities have paid special attention to the remembrance of the Shoah. The turning point in the expression of the authorities’ awareness of the exceptional nature of the Shoah came with the 1994 celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Belgium. The organizations representing the Jewish community had requested that the military parade scheduled for 3 September (a Saturday) should not pause symbolically in front of the Memorial to Belgium’s Jewish Martyrs (Anderlecht, Brussels). Instead an impressive ceremony was held at the same symbolic location on the Sunday. Some two thousand people were in attendance, including senior government figures, and Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene gave a speech. The whole of the political class was represented - or the democratic parties, at least, from both the majority and the opposition.

The celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Nazi camps included a national pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The key thing to bear in mind is that this was organized in March 1995 at the joint request of Defence Minister Karel Pinxten and the National Committee of the Jewish community for the fiftieth anniversary celebrations. The Air Force chartered three planes to transport the 500 or so eminent figures on the pilgrimage along with the survivors of the Jewish deportations. On their return, Parliament adopted the law of 23 March “aimed at putting an end to the denial, minimization, justification or approval of the genocide committed by the national socialist regime”. On 19 December 1995 a Senate committee asked that “a day be set aside in Belgium and all European Union member states in remembrance of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and to stress the ties between the Nazi ideology and the racism and xenophobia that is increasingly coming to the fore in modern life”.

Belgium opted to remember the genocide on 8 May which, while not a public holiday, is nevertheless dedicated to the victory of democracy over dictatorship and the liberation of the freedom fighters who survived the Nazi death camps. In 1998, at the request of the Jewish Community, the government, which sends representatives to the organized ceremonies, asked the Coordination Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium to take charge of all the events staged on 8 May to mark national remembrance of the genocide.
What is more, 1998 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948) and the Convention for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide (9 December 1948). The Federal Information Service issued 350,000 brochures pointing out this coincidence and detailing the persecution, deportation and extermination of Jews in occupied Belgium and the genocide of European Jews. This initiative came from the interministerial committee meeting of 8 May. The committee is answerable to the prime minister’s office and is made up of officials from the federal, regional and language community ministries concerned.

In federal Belgium each level of power - the federal state and the Flemish, French and German-speaking Communities - all have their own powers and responsibilities where the remembrance of the Shoah is concerned.

2. Legal recognition of the hardships endured by the Jewish community
At the federal level the requirements of the Jewish organizations needed to be met with regard to the legal recognition of the hardships endured by the Jewish community during the Nazi occupation. The Union of Deported Jews and their Dependents was founded in the 1950s precisely because the status of political prisoner did not recognize deportees for racial reasons. In the 1970s and 80s the Union was enlarged to encompass the Sons and Daughters of the Deportation, i.e. the children of deportees who have assumed their moral heritage. More often than not those who escaped deportation could only do so by going underground. They had to wait until the 1990s before they were able to emerge from what was still morally a clandestine existence. In 1991 the new Hidden Child association finally gave them a forum for expression and recognition. They are also trying to win the title of the Righteous Gentile, awarded by the Yad Vashem, to the people who helped them escape persecution at the hands of the Nazis.

These specific demands made by the Jewish community coincide with the still unsatisfied demands of war cripples, veterans' associations and the victims of war. The Civil Service Minister, André Flahaut, who is responsible for such matters, has set up a central commission to look into the remaining problems. After hearing the case put by the Jewish community, the minister agreed that it should be represented in the commission.

Thanks to government support, the commission's work culminated in the law of 26 January 1999. This grants political prisoner status to all living survivors of the Jewish deportations on moral grounds, even if they were foreign nationals (as 93% of Belgian Jews were at the time) and were unable to present the evidence previously demanded of having been involved in selfless patriotic activity. The law also establishes a new status of national recognition of Jewish children forced into hiding during the Second World War. Finally, the law allows those who performed actions in defence of the members of the Jewish community to obtain the moral title of members of the civil resistance, with the accompanying honorary Righteous of Belgium certificate awarded by the appropriate ministry.

In addition, a Royal Decree of 6 July 1997 established the Study Commission into the fate of the assets of the members of the Jewish Community of Belgium that were despoiled or surrendered during the Second World War. This commission was appointed for a two-year period, with the possibility of one further two-year extension. Reporting to the office of the prime minister, the commission’s powers have since been increased with its legal basis now enshrined in the law of 15 January 1999. This law makes it illegal to destroy any archives, authorizes - within the limits of the privacy laws - the creation of a database drawing on personal data archives, and gives access to the national register.

3. From primary or secondary schools to historical locations and places of remembrance

The three Communities, Flemish, French and German-speaking, all work closely with civil society organizations in the specific areas of education and culture for which they are empowered. Associations of former deportees, including Jewish associations, organize events in schools and arrange visits to historical locations and places of remembrance, both in Belgium and abroad.

There have been a number of highly original initiatives in this context. For example, in November 1995 the mayor of Namur, Jean-Louis Close, in association with the French Community, sent a “Train of a Thousand Souls” to Auschwitz-Birkenau, retracing the deportation route for one thousand Namur schoolchildren, their teachers and former deportees. The trip featured in a TV broadcast as part of the RTBF’s Hebdo series, and a radio show, “They left in their thousands” which included interviews with eight accompanying former deportees was produced as a joint CD with UNESCO in 1998.

Of note, too, was the initiative of the French Community’s General Delegate for Children’s Rights, Claude Lelièvre, and Defence Minister André Flahaut organized to mark the 10th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. In March 1999, when Mr Flahaut was still Civil Service Minister, he sponsored and took part in the 13th annual pilgrimage to Auschwitz and Birkenau organized by the Union of Jewish Deportees and the Sons and Daughters of the Deportation. At his request, some 30 pupils from secondary schools in the Walloon Brabant region accompanied the pilgrimage. On 8 December 1999, to mark the anniversary of the Convention, the Defence Minister paid a return visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau with the French Community’s General Delegate for Children’s Rights. Another 50 officer cadets joined them from the Royal Military Academy, together with a group of juvenile delinquents from the state Child Protection Institutions! This initiative was part of a larger reflection on the theme of children in times of war. Technically speaking, the Jewish children who were gassed the moment they reached Auschwitz were not the victims of war, even if the surrounding armed conflict created more favourable conditions for the genocide. In a typical genocide children are prime targets for the executioners, for it is through killing them that they make the grave decision to wipe this people from the face of the earth. Indeed, these are the words of the leader of the SS, Himmler, speaking in 1943 about the fate of Jewish women and children.

4. A focus for remembrance
While they do not have the same impact as a visit to Auschwitz or Birkenau, the places of remembrance established in Belgium nevertheless attract tens of thousands of pupils annually from schools in all three language communities. Every year schoolchildren flock to the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen, and the Breendonk Fort Memorial. In Mechelen - unlike in Breendonk - guides and volunteers show 25,000 young visitors a year around the museum. For Belgian schools and school teachers this museum is now an introduction to the history and remembrance of the Shoah.

Located half-way between Brussels and Antwerp, this museum, founded in November 1996, has become a real focus for remembrance. It is housed in a wing of the former Dossin Barracks where the Jews were assembled for deportation; the barracks are situated just a few kilometres from Breendonk Fort, an SS camp that saw the most brutal suppression of the resistance. The curator of the Mechelen Museum, Ward Adriaens, is keen to stress their proximity. Both locations, places of history and remembrance, are of significant ethical importance. They are symbols of the Nazi repression: Breendonk Fort a symbol of political persecution and the denial of freedom; and Dossin Barracks a symbol of racial persecution, anti-Semitism in this case, and the denial of equality. Historically, the Jewish assembly camp is the antechamber of death - in the proper sense of the term. At the next stop, Auschwitz-Birkenau, two-thirds of the Jewish deportees would be immediately sent to the gas chambers. The remaining third were killed by forced labour in the Auschwitz concentration camp: Mechelen was the departure point on a one-way journey. Of the 25,257 Jewish and Gypsy deportees sent to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944, barely 1,207 - less than 5% - were still alive on 8 May 1945.

The Mechelen Museum traces the story from its beginnings: from 1919, when Nazi anti-Semitism was born in Germany, to the autumn of 1940, when Belgium was occupied, to the first anti-Jewish decrees issued by German military command, and finally to the deportation and massacre of European Jews at the hands of firing squads or in the gas chambers and, to a lesser extent, their death in the ghettoes and concentration camps. The historian Maxime Steinberg, an expert in the Final Solution in occupied Belgium, devised the historical scenario, while museographer Paul Vandebotermet designed the exhibits to carefully combine scientific exactitude with legitimate emotion. In each room the concern for instruction is combined with the concern to achieve maximum image impact. The Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance offers one of the best introductions to the Jewish genocide in Belgium and Europe.

Unlike the national memorial in Breendonk, the Mechelen Museum is not a public institution. It belongs to the Central Israelite Consistory and was founded by members of the Jewish community and Auschwitz survivors, under the chairmanship of Nathan Ramet, a 17-year-old deportee, who all chose to contribute towards the building of this alternative memorial. However, the museum did receive a substantial start-up subsidy from the federal state. The Flemish government rightly decided that this place of history and remembrance on Flemish soil was a memorial rather than just another museum, and consequently it took over the running of the building via an annual subsidy, thereby allowing the museum to operate as a viable concern. It also receives subsidies from the Province of Antwerp and the city of Mechelen.

By personally opening the museum on 8 May 1995, King Albert II formalized the authorities’ concern. The minister-presidents of the Flemish and French communities, Luc Van den Brande and Laurette Onkelinx, both expressed an interest in visiting the museum, along with their government ministers and even federal ministers. The minister-president of the French community and the federal Civil Service Minister, André Flahaut, both visited the museum during the 8 May 1998 celebrations.

On a more practical level, the interest shown by the community authorities emerges in the structural ties linking the Mechelen Museum to the various education networks. These are represented on two teaching commissions, one Dutch-speaking and one French-speaking, whereby the museum can reach out to the whole Belgian education system.

5. An active approach to citizenship teaching
There have been a number of noteworthy initiatives organized as part of school visits to the Mechelen and Breendonk sites. The town of Huy and the Assembly of the French Community Commission of the Brussels-Capital Region each stage an annual group visit for hundreds of schoolchildren. The initiative developed by the senator-mayor of Huy, Anne-Marie Lizin, and her education department is notable for the fact that it targets all local pupils in the 11-12 age group. To help these children approach such a sensitive issue whose central, defining feature is barbaric violence, the French Community’s self-teaching centre in Tihange has designed a pedagogical module for an interactive visit, with special training for teachers on how best to approach the Mechelen Museum with their pupils.

The initiative taken by Robert Hotyat, President of the Assembly of the French Community Commission of the Brussels-Capital Region is geared towards pupils in the 14-16 age group. In the spring of 1995 the European Centre for Shoah, anti-Semitism and Genocide Research (the laboratory of the Institute of Jewish Studies associated with the Free University of Brussels (ULB)) carried out a survey on a sample of 2,000 pupils from the Brussels region aged 16-17.

The survey revealed major gaps in their knowledge of the Nazi period, the Second World War and the German occupation of Belgium. However, because it was carried out shortly after the Auschwitz liberation celebrations it revealed a definite awareness on the part of these young people of things being commemorated and of the extermination of European Jews.

Research done in the Flemish Community led to a similar conclusion. Education Minister Luc Van den Bossche tasked an inter-university team with devising a tool for analyzing the erosion of historical awareness in an educational model.

To plug these gaps in the Brussels education system the inspectorate focused on teacher training. Special teaching days, “Echoes of Memory” were organized with experts instructing teachers on the situation and progress of historical knowledge with regard to the 1930s and 1940s.

The joint visits to Mechelen and Breendonk organized by the president of the Assembly of the French Community Commission of the Brussels-Capital Region also serve another pedagogical purpose. The hundreds of schoolchildren involved in the operation are also being involved in a broader event geared towards developing their sense of citizenship. For example, after the 1997 round of visits, delegates from each participating school met in a special session held in the Brussels Parliament chamber to adopt a parliamentary-style resolution on modern-day democracy and the dangers currently posed by the far right, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

However, the Assembly of the French Community Commission of the Brussels-Capital Region was also careful not to overlook the need for rigour in historical knowledge. With the help of the French Community’s “Democracy or Barbarism” pedagogical coordination unit, a brochure was published entitled Le Fort de Breendonk, le camp de la terreur nazie en Belgique pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale [Breendonk Fort, the Nazi Terror Camp in Belgium during the Second World War], intended as an aid for teachers guiding their pupils around this historical site.

6. The French Community’s Democracy or Barbarism unit
The Democracy or Barbarism unit was originally created to assist teachers in the French Community during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Nazi death camps. It subsequently had its mandate renewed and is now surrounded by a network of 1,600 teachers, acting as relays, who cover all secondary schools, their primary task being to promote the teaching of citizenship in the French Community.

In a multidisciplinary and horizontal framework reaching across the whole education system, the cell has developed references to the events of the 1930s and 1940s - and in particular the genocide of the Jews - as an active component of citizenship teaching, helping pupils to develop a critical view of the present as well as of the past.

The 1990s threw up increasing examples of intolerance and exclusion, and some instances of extreme violence. The mechanisms at work present some analogies with those that finally led to past acts of barbarity. In the teaching of a sense of citizenship and human rights it is essential that pupils grasp these analogies and in that way obtain a better grasp of the differences. When comparing historical and current events they will develop their own links with the past through reference to the values that they adhere to. As with any form of memory, the memory of young people generations removed from the Second World War can only develop out of their own experiences anchored in the present day.

If carried out at the educational level, this action will benefit, as far as the French Community is concerned, from the increased resources for citizenship and equal opportunities teaching provided by Minister-President Hervé Hasquin. The synergy between schools and their community environment enhances the effectiveness of the resources for information on democracy and solidarity provided by the Minister of Secondary School Education Pierre Hazette. The Democracy or Barbarism unit promotes this, e.g. by editing the quarterly publication Le Contre-Pied for secondary school pupils.

Visiting sites of historical importance and places of remembrance contributes to this development. Consequently, the Democracy or Barbarism unit pays special attention to the teaching of the Shoah. It has a place on the Mechelen Museum’s French-speaking education commission which designed the brochure entitled De la persécution à l’extermination, Malines-Auschwitz [From persecution to extermination, Mechelen-Auschwitz]. Published with the assistance of the French Community, this tool, combined with a teacher’s input, will help pupils visiting the museum to focus more precisely on the important historical concepts that they need to comprehend.

7. Educational tools
In the French-speaking Community, teachers can also order an education pack entitled The Genocide of the Jews (1941-1944). This tool was designed by a committee of history teachers led by their inspectorate. Produced in 1990 and updated in 1994 when it was reprinted, this pack differs from other educational tools in that it comprises a document-based approach, starting with the persecution of the Jews in occupied Belgium.

From an ethical viewpoint, this approach is essential if an ethical framework is to be created for memory-related issues associated with the historical responsibility of those who, being neither executioners nor victims, were not mere bystanders. Indeed, as the British historian Ian Kershaw points out, historical research reveals that whilst it may have been the fruit of hatred, the road to Auschwitz is paved with indifference.

The Auschwitz and the Third Reich education pack produced by the Brussels-based Auschwitz Foundation, with the help of history teachers, confines itself to the relationship between the executioner and his victim and argues more in favour of the symbolism of Auschwitz in our collective memory. This foundation, which was set up by the Association of Former Political Prisoners from jails and camps in Silesia and Auschwitz-Birkenau, also offers schools its itinerant exhibition entitled The World of Concentration Camps which, like its education pack, was not designed to encourage remembrance of the Shoah.

Other associations also place ready-made exhibitions at the disposal of educational establishments, such as Anne Frank and the Shoah, an exhibition put together by the Middle Eastern Information and Documentation Centre in Brussels, and Exclusions et génocides au XXe siècle à travers la bande dessinée (Exclusion and Genocide in 20th Century Comics), put together by the secular centre Maison de Laïcité in Liège. Finally, various associations, including Les Territoires de la Mémoire (Territories of Remembrance) in Liège or Vredescentrum (Peace Centre) in Antwerp, have mounted permanent exhibitions on their premises, as well as offering visitors the resources of their documentation centre or multimedia reference library. All the same, these educational activities, which are designed to promote peace and tolerance and even reject racism and xenophobia, do not necessarily intersect with the remembrance of the Shoah.

8. Victory Days and the Flemish Community
The same applies to the activities on Victory Days (V-Dagen), which were launched by the Flemish Community on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the liberation of the Nazi camps. This celebration of victory days, an initiative taken by Education Minister Luc Van den Bossche and the teaching networks, encourages thousands of schoolchildren on or around 8 May to go and visit First World War and Second World War sites. The whole operation benefits from the support of associations like the Vredescentrum (Peace Centre) in Antwerp, the Vredeshuis (House of Peace) in Ghent and the Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. Repeated each year, and spread out over the months of April and May, the Victory Days involve between 20,000 and 30,000 pupils. Some 4,000 to 5,000 of them visit Breendonk Fort and the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen, which feature amongst the venues suggested for a visit.

It is also thanks to the Victory Days that works produced by the Mechelen Museum and its Dutch-speaking Education Committee can be published. One of these publications endeavours to take apart the mechanisms of manipulation practised by Holocaust revisionists. In the Flemish Community, these Far Right machinations are systematically exerting pressure on educational establishments. in this respect, the museum is the best method of counter-attack, and its first didactic teaching guide was put together by its Education Committee.

At the actual educational level, the participation of network representatives in the seminar organized by the Mechelen Museum in autumn 1999, some of whom going to Antwerp, others going to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem led them to decide to give education about the Shoah a more prominent place in teaching on the subject and deal with it in greater detail in history syllabuses. There are also plans to provide teachers with more impressive material, and the universities will lend their support by offering continuing training to teachers on this subject. The Flemish Community educational magazine Klasse, first published 10 years ago, specifically attracts the attention of its readers (teachers, pupils and their parents) on these problems.

9. Situation in the eastern cantons of Belgium
The Flemish guidebook to the museum in Mechelen, translated into German, is a useful tool for schools in the German-speaking Community, which has a special angle in Belgium, where its relations with Nazi crimes are concerned. The eastern cantons, which were German until 1920, were annexed during the Second World War. The awareness of having being on the same side as Nazi Germany during the war has left little room for remembering the victims of the Shoah. Nonetheless, there are also favourable aspects to the involvement of this border region, whose inhabitants helped Jewish refugees to cross the border just before the war. A documentary made by the German film-maker Dietrich Schubert retraces this flight of thousands of German Jews from Losheim to Kalterherberg in 1938-39. This film, which was shown in Saint-Vith on 16 November 1990, was a big hit with secondary school pupils. A large number of participants also attended the conference held in Eupen on 17 October 1994 by Ignatz Bubis, the president of the Central Committee of Jewish Citizens of Germany who had been invited by Education Minister Bernd Gentges.

The schools in the German-speaking Community also took part in the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and were careful to mention the Shoah on that occasion. Indeed, between 12 February and 12 March more than 3,000 schoolchildren visited the exhibition entitled Die Welt der Anne Frank (The World of Anne Frank), presented by the Volkshochschule der Ostkantone (Eastern Cantons' Adult Education Institute) in Eupen.

All these activities, whether taking place in the eastern cantons or in the Flemish or French Communities, all need teachers to integrate the awareness of historical and ethical information into a significant teaching programme for which their pupils are generally ill-prepared.

10. Teacher training, university teaching and research
Various initiatives taken by the respective associations are geared towards compensating for the lack of training in this area. For instance, the Auschwitz Foundation arranges annual week-long study trips to Auschwitz, supported by, as far as Dutch-speaking teachers are concerned, the Flemish Community; the Institute of Jewish Studies associated with the Free University of Brussels (ULB) organizes a biennial training seminar supported by the French Community during the Easter holiday; and the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance stages education days for teachers visiting the museum with the pupils, with the support of the French Community with regard to its teachers. The training seminars held in Cracow, including visits to Auschwitz and Birkenau, by the Brussels-based European Centre for Shoah, Anti-Semitism and Genocide Research are also aimed at the leaders of Belgian youth movements, as well as at journalists and journalism students.

These training measures are both useful and necessary, especially if specialists in the problems they raise take part. But the fact remains that whatever initial training people have received, the progress made in terms of fresh knowledge and understanding and the sheer volume of data makes refresher courses absolutely essential. Of course, initial training is still also of fundamental importance, which raises the issue of the place for teaching people about the Shoah in higher education and at university, in educational science departments at the colleges which train teachers at primary school level and above, and in those university faculties which produce qualified teachers for secondary and higher education.
Unlike in the United States, the structures underlying university education here do not lend themselves to chairs of history specializing in the Shoah. In fact the Institute of Jewish Studies in Brussels is the only establishment offering a course on the Historical aspects of anti-Semitism and the genocide, run by the historian Maxime Steinberg. This institute, which is better known under its old name - the Martin Buber Institute - is associated with the Institute of Religious and Secular Studies at the Free university of Brussels; indeed, so close are the links between them that students at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters can opt to include Professor Steinberg's course in their university studies. However, the course is mandatory for students acquiring the diploma in advanced studies awarded by the institute.
Professor Steinberg was also the first historian to complete a PhD thesis on the 'final solution' in Belgium, in 1987 at the Free University of Brussels. In 1999 a young historian, Lieven Saerens, presented a PhD thesis at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) on Antwerp and its Jewish community. Saerens attacked various historical problems in the light of archive material that had now become available for study and highlighted the vulnerability of the Jews of Antwerp, two-thirds of whom were decimated by deportation, whilst on average more than 50% of Jews in Belgium managed to elude the attempt made by the SS and their Belgian henchmen to capture them.

Nonetheless, having said that, professors at most Belgian universities have for years been supervising undergraduate dissertations on the historical problems associated with anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the fruits of such research are rarely brought to the public's attention. Thus it was only in 1994 that the Belgian public was finally informed about the meeting in 1989 between Belgian historians and their Israeli colleagues at a colloquium on the Holocaust period in Belgium, an event which was jointly organized by the University of Bar Ilan, the Centre for Historical Research and Study in Brussels (now called the Centre for Research into War and Contemporary Societies, or CEGES).

11. Preserving the archives of the dead
Today, the CEGES ranks after the War Victims' Administration as the second most important archive centre in the country, where researchers can peruse sources to do with the Shoah in Belgium. However, the material collected by the CEGES does not rival the archives accumulated since 1945 by the War Victims' Administration, which at the time was a department of the Ministry of Reconstruction and is now run by the Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Public Health and the Environment.

The War Victims' Administration is the repository of the main archives on the deportation of the Jews, including the Transportlisten (transport lists) drawn up on the future deportees' arrival at the Mechelen transit camp and the 56,000 card-index files on Jews maintained by the Judenabteilung (Jewish Department) of the SS police, or SIPO-SD.

These archives are of inestimable historical and moral value. They are the archives of death. For two-thirds of the 25,000 Jewish deportees, they are the last traces left in history before they vanished, on the day of their arrival at their destination, in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre. Deportees who were taken into the concentration camp and whose registration number is known left very few traces owing to the destruction of the archives before the camp's liberation. One source that remained unknown for a long time and is now available again is collection of Sterbebücher, the books of the dead of Auschwitz, in other words the death certificates drawn up at the time for detainees held in the concentration camp. Perusing this source, the archivist at the Mechelen Museum, Laurence Schram, managed to trace 1,207 deportees whose date of death had been unknown by the War Victims' Administration since 1945.

Since 1997, working together with the Israelite Central Consistory and the War Victims' Administration, the Jewish Museum in Mechelen, acting on advice given by the Royal Institute of Artistic Heritage, started scanning and cataloguing these precious archives of the dead. At the same time they transferred the originals onto paper with a view to their long-term preservation. This programme is also being supported by the European Union.
Exploiting the potential offered by computers, the documentation centre of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance also aims to centralize in its databases information on all the archives relating to the Shoah, not only its own collection, the originals of which come predominantly from private sources, but also those held by other institutions, including the archives of the Cities of Brussels and Antwerp where 90% of the Jews in Belgium were living at the time.

12. The memories of Jews who escaped
Whereas the historians dealing with the history of the Shoah in Belgium are busy with archive material, others - such as political analysts and journalists, as well as historians - are endeavouring to gather the accounts of Jews who evaded deportation, who escaped, who were members of the resistance, and so forth. This data-gathering operation began in 1945. The individual case files maintained by the War Victims' Administration are the most valuable sources of this kind. Several campaigns aimed at gathering oral accounts have been conducted since then.

Since the 1980s, however, these data-gathering operations have triggered off a real trend in oral history. Rather than risk having the human truth about victims' personal experience be lost to history, eye-witnesses are constantly being rooted out, either for television programmes or for the establishment of oral archives. They, too, have a pressing need to broadcast their message, and are urged on even more by the provocations of revisionists' machinations and the stir these cause in the media. After all, audiovisual techniques are a suitable way of establishing oral archives.

In 1996, the Spielberg Foundation - set up by the famous American filmmaker whose works include Schindler's List - came to recruit interviewers, whom it trains in house to record eyewitness accounts. Meanwhile, Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies set up a Belgian office at the Auschwitz Foundation in Brussels. Since the 1980s the latter has been gathering eyewitness accounts which are published in its quarterly newsletter, assisted since 1992 by the Audiovisual Centre of the Free University of Brussels, which has a recording studio as well as professional and scientific staff. All in all, including the recordings made on behalf of the Auschwitz Foundation, the university's Audiovisual Centre has amassed oral archives comprising more than 1,200 hours of interviews.

Other institutions, too, such as the Foundation for Contemporary Memory, are also collecting eyewitness accounts. This organization, set up in Brussels in 1994, conducts research into all aspects of the life of Jewish communities in Belgium.

When asked in this way, the witnesses publish their memoirs, sometimes at their own expense. This is how, taken in addition to publications from previous decades, a corpus of first-hand accounts, ‘ego-documents’ as they are called by specialist Gie Van den Berghe of Ghent University, is created. The history of the memory thus becomes a study object, for the memoirs of camps survivors in particular, matched up with audiovisual records, throw light on how that memory has been constituted over half a century.

Like the published memoirs, the audiovisual accounts will be of great value in 21st century. At a time when there will be hardly any more first-hand accounts by actual eyewitnesses, it is via these archives that the human dimension of a story of extreme barbarism will emerge.

1.Merely 10% of the 1,194 Jews who survived deportation were able to obtain the status of political prisoner (see Laurence Schram, La mémoire des rescapés juifs d'Auschwitz, [the memory of the Jewish survivors of Auschwitz] political science dissertation, U.L.B., 1992-1993, p.46).

2.Ils étaient des milliers … Le Voyage "Aller-Retour" de 8 déportés (1940-1945) [They left in their thousands, the journey of eight deportees (1940-1945) there and back], interviews recorded on the "Train of a Thousand Souls", Crédit Communal journalism prize, RTBF Éditions, Brussels, 1997.

3.The interest of the Belgian authorities dates back to before the 1994/1995 celebrations. Approached by the Lauder Foundation, an American institution that drew up the estimates for the cost of repairing the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, Belgium contributed almost BF40 million. A Royal Decree of 21 February 1992 stated that this money would be paid out of the Interior Ministry’s budget in four annual installments. The money goes to the State Museum of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) via a non-profit-making association founded on 22 May 1993, the Belgian Committee for the Preservation and Restoration of the Concentration and Extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This association consists of representatives of the Central Israelite Consistory, the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations, the Union of Jewish Deportees - the Sons and Daughters of the Deportation, the International Auschwitz Committee and the Brussels Auschwitz Foundation.

4.Some 66% of the pupils surveyed viewed revisionism as lying about history, but 15% thought it was a positive thing. Cf. the analysis of the survey results in J. Kotek & A. Medhoune, L'école face au racisme: les jeunes au défi de l'ethnicité, [Schools and racism: young people and the ethnic challenge] Pub. Quorum, Gerpinnes, 1998.

5.This inter-university study group, led by Professors W. Goegebeur (of the Free University of Brussels (VUB)), F.Simon (of Ghent University) and F. De Keyser (of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL)) was published in W. Goegebeur, F. Simon, R. De Keyser, J. Van Dooren, & P. Van Landeghem, De verwerving van historisch besef als voorwaarde tot waarde-onderwijsontwikkeling van een analyse-instrument [The acquisition of historical awareness as a condition for the teaching of values: development of an analysis tool]. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 1997; and, by the same authors, Historisch besefhoe waarden-volOntwikkeling van een analyse-instrument. [Historical awareness; how valuable?! Development of an analysis tool] Vubpress, Brussels, 1999.

6.Ian Kershaw, L'opinion allemande sous le nazisme, Bavière 1933-1945 (Popular opinion and political dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933-1945), CNRS Éditions, Paris, 1995, p.245

7.The reference to former political prisoners relates to the status conferred by the Belgian authorities and indicates that they are part of the 10% of the 1,194 people who eluded deportation as Jews and benefit from such recognition.

8.Stijn Vanermen, De ontkenning van de Jodenuitroeiing: van manipulatie tot negatie van bronnen (Denial of the Extermination of the Jews: From Manipulation to the Negation of Sources), Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, Mechelen, 1997, 80 p.

9.DUTCH-SPEAKING EDUCATION COMMITTEE - JEWISH MUSEUM OF DEPORTATION AND RESISTANCE, Didactische gids voor een bezoek aan het Joods Museum van Deportatie en Verzet, Mechelen (Didactic guide for visiting the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance), 1997, 66 p.

10.The title of the film by Dietrich Schubert is Nicht verzeichnete Fluchtbewegungen. Oder wie die Juden in der Westeifel in die Freiheit kamen (Unrecorded routes taken by fleeing refugees, or how the Jews in the western Eifel region of Germany reached freedom). The film-maker's wife, Katharina Schubert, has published the following work on the same subject: Fluchtweg Eifel. Spurensuche an einer kaum beachteten Grenze (The Eifel escape route. Seeking traces on a virtually disregarded border), Zurich, 1992.

11.Maxime Steinberg, L'Etoile et le Fusil (The star and the gun), t. III, vol. 1 and 2, La Traque des Juifs (Tracking down the Jews), 1942-1944, Editions Vie Ouvrière, Brussels, 1987.

12.Lieven Saerens, Vreemdelingen in een Wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en haar joodse gemeenschap 1880-1944 (Aliens in a world city. A history of Antwerp and its Jewish community 1880-1944), 3 volumes, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), 1999.

13.The problems associated with the history of and archive material on the Shoah in Belgium are presented in Les Archives de la Shoah en Belgique (Archives on the Shoah in Belgium) by Maxime Steinberg & Laurence Schram, in J. FREDJ dir., Les archives de la Shoah (Archives on the Shoah), CDJC-L’Harmattan, Paris, 1998.

14.See also Frank Caestecker's Ongewenste gasten. Joodse vluchtelingen en migranten in de dertiger jaren in België (Unwelcome guests. Jewish refugees and immigrants in Belgium in the 1930s). Brussels, 1993 and the articles on the Church and the Jews in F.Maerten, F. Selleslagh & M. Van Den Wijngaert, Entre la peste et le choléra.Vie et attitude des catholiques belges sous l’occupation (Between the devil and the deep blue sea. The life and attitude of Belgian Catholics during Belgium's occupation), Quorum/CEGES/ACRA, Gerpinnes, 1999.

15.Several articles were published in R. Van Doorslaer ed., Les Juifs de Belgique. De l'immigration au génocide, 1925-1945 (The Jews of Belgium. From immigration to genocide, 1925-1945) C.R.E.H.S.G.M., Brussels, 1994. The proceedings of the collloquium were published in English nine years later: D. Michman ed., Belgium and the Holocaust, Jews, Belgians, Germans, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1998.

16.One example is the programme broadcast by the French-speaking Belgian radio and television network RTBF entitled Auschwitz ou la mémoire qui revient (Auschwitz or the recurring memory), produced by Guy Lejeune, Mariane Sluszny, Christian Dupont and Henri Orfinger for the magazine C'est à voir, RTBF 1, 9/11/1985; another, shown by the Flemish TV company VTM, was De laatste Getuigen (The last witnesses), a programme by Lucas Vander Taelen, produced by Tele Ventura.VTM, 1992.

17.Gie Van den Berghe, Getuigen : een case-study over ego-documenten: bibliographie van ego-documenten over de nationaal-socialistische kampen en gevangenissen, geschreven of getekend door Belgische (ex-)gevangenen (Witnesses: A case study of autobiographical documents: bibliography of autobiographical documents about National Socialist camps and prisons, written or signed by Belgian (ex-)prisoners), Centre for Research and Study into the History of the Second World War, Brussels, 1995.

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Introduction

Opening Session: Messages and speeches

Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches

Workshops, Panels and Seminars

Closing Session and Declaration

Other Activities

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