2023-06-12 18:11:42
The story is terrible and might have disappeared into the limbo of memory without an extraordinary coincidence. The new owner of a building, located in Brussels and which had housed the Gatti de Gamond boarding school, noticed one day graffiti hidden in a chimney.
“When I discovered these inscriptions on my fireplace, I also discovered papers and articles which attested that a certain Andrée Ovar had been declared Righteous among the Nations for her parents who died in deportation. It gave me life to find the origin of this affair and to discover the identity of the actors of this drama.“
A roundup of Jewish children
Intrigued, Frederic Dambreville, painter, then begins an investigation which will lead him to discover the tragic story of a roundup of Jewish children which had taken place in his building on June 12, 1943.
The Ovar-Henrys, the couple who ran the boarding school, were then hiding regarding fifteen Jewish children and nine adults.
The Germans, warned by a neighbour, landed at dawn and rounded up everyone, including the director, her husband and their daughter.
The Jewish children, the youngest of whom was two and a half years old, were first sent to the Dossin barracks in Mechelen. Detained for a month and a half, they are then sent to Auschwitz.
Three boys manage to escape but eleven children perish in the German camp.
Only a young woman will survive, freed by the Allies during a “death march”; vshe steps where the guards of the camps forced the deportees to walk dozens of kilometers to flee the advance of the Allies.
For 60 years, this survivor will keep these terrible events a secret.
A 12-year investigation
Frédéric Dambreville will take twelve years to write an 800-page book that traces this tragedy: The Disappeared by Gatti de Gamond.
The author managed to find the identity of each of the deported children and to give them back, if not a face, at least bits of existence, following decades of silence and oblivion.
“He takes the victims out of the anonymity and shadow into which they had fallen, tears them away from the annihilation of memory which doubles their assassination.” notes the publisher of this book published by CFC editions.
On June 12, the municipal authorities of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre placed a commemorative plaque on this building, which had been forgotten for more than 60 years.
Already in 2018, 15 memory tiles were placed in front of the boarding school in homage to those rounded up.
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