The Committee for Jewish Defense – affiliated with the underground movement in Belgium – which since July, 1942 has been helping Jews find hiding places and placed Jewish children with Christian families to avoid their deportation by the Germans, marked the end of its underground activities by arranging a special luncheon for several hundred Jewish soldiers of the Allied armies now stationed here.
The lightning advance of the Allied armies into Belgium saved from deportation large numbers of Belgian Jews including 800 inmates of the Brussels Jewish Home for the Aged, the Socialist newspaper Le Peuple reveals. Preparation for the deportations had already been completed by a Gestapo officer named Burger, who boasted that he carried out wholesale deportations of the Jews of Greece within a few days, the paper says.
In addition to the inmates of the home for the aged, 520 Jewish internees confined in the Dossin barracks at Malines were slated for deportation. They were rescued a few hours before their scheduled departure by the Committee for Jewish Defense. The joy of the 800 aged Jews was indescribable when many of them found their sons among the Belgian units arriving in Brussels, Le Peuple also reports.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
