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A Letter to the Late Mademoiselle Jeanne

By Harry Markowicz

In the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is a plaque indicating that Jeanne Daman-Scaglione has been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. The plaque reads: “A Roman Catholic, Daman became a teacher, and later headmistress, of the Jewish kindergarten ‘Nos Petits’ in Brussels. When arrests and deportations of Jews began in 1942, she worked with Belgian and Jewish resistance units, helping to find hiding places for 2,000 children throughout Belgium. Daman also helped rescue many Jewish men about to be deported as slave laborers by obtaining false papers for them.”

Chère Madame Jeanne Daman-Scaglione:

Our paths crossed, at least figuratively if not in fact, when you were in your early 20s and already risking your life by helping to save hundreds of Jewish children and adults in your native Belgium during the German occupation. The danger was obvious: your own cousin was imprisoned at Ravensbrueck concentration camp and your uncle was murdered at Mauthausen for their participation in the underground. Half a century passed before I learned how your humanitarian actions touched my own life and that of my sister, Rosi, and brother, Mani.

In the summer of 1942, when the Germans started deporting Jews to Eastern Europe, my family went into hiding. My siblings and I were placed mostly in the homes of sympathetic gentile Belgian families. When our hiding places were deemed too dangerous, we were moved elsewhere. Rosi and I were both moved four times; at the first three locations, she and I were together because I was only five years old and too young to be placed with strangers by myself. Mani was with us in the first setting, which didn’t last very long. After that, he was moved six or seven more times on his own. For reasons I can’t remember, on several occasions I also stayed with my parents in their hiding place.

My memories of the first three places are vague, because I spent at most a few weeks or maybe one or two months in each one. My last hiding place was with the Vanderlinden family: Adolph and Adèle and their teenage daughter, Florence. It lasted until the liberation of Brussels—around a year and a half—but in my mind it seems much longer. I have many fond memories of the time I spent with them, as well as some not-so-pleasant ones resulting from the Nazi occupation and the need to hide the real me. Passing for their son required that I take on a new identity, including a different name, a different religion, and a different personal history.

What I don’t remember at all—and neither does Mani who is eight years older than me—is how we traveled from one location to another and who accompanied us. From my reading about the actions of the Belgian underground, I learned that Jewish children were usually taken to their hiding places in all regions of Belgium by young gentile Belgian women who were less likely to attract attention traveling with young children and babies.

Sometime in 1995, Rosi learned that she was in an advanced stage of liver cancer. Because she lived in New York City and I in Maryland, she arranged for the two of us to spend a long weekend at a condo in Atlantic City. It was off-season, and we spent most of our time together walking on the boardwalk and reminiscing about events and people from our past.

Rosi told me about an article published years earlier in the New York Post praising your heroism as a member of the Belgian resistance during World War II and your role in helping to save 2,000 Jewish children. She also told me a story I had never heard, because in my family we never spoke about our experiences living in pre-war Nazi Germany and subsequently in German-occupied Belgium. 

While our mother was trying to find hiding places for us, she heard from another Jewish woman she barely knew about underground organizations that helped Jews. One of the main activities of these organizations, she was told, was finding hiding places for Jewish children, often in Catholic institutions such as convents, orphanages, and boarding schools, as well as in private homes of non-Jewish Belgian families. This woman gave our mother an address where she could make contact with one of these organizations. Our mother asked Rosi, who was merely 14 years old then, to interpret for her, because our mother’s knowledge of French—the language most commonly spoken in Brussels—was limited.

Rosi and our mother went to the address and rang the doorbell, terrified that it might be a trap. In those days, almost anyone could be a collaborator or an informant. They were told to wait in a nearly empty apartment, which only added to their fears. Finally, a young woman in her early 20s joined them in the apartment. Presumably, members of the organization took their own precautions against Gestapo informants. She referred to herself by a first name only: Mademoiselle Jeanne.

According to what Rosi learned about you in the New York Post, she was convinced that Mademoiselle Jeanne and you were the same person. Also, Rosi saw a strong resemblance between her memory of the young woman she met at a very stressful time in her life and the picture of you that accompanied the Post article. 

Rosi then suggested that I write to you. The article provided no address but did state that you were living in Chapel Hill where your husband, Aldo Scaglione, was a renowned professor of European literature at the University of North Carolina. So we decided I would write the letter to you, but mail it to his department at the university.

Some time later, while visiting the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I came across the plaque honoring you on the wall of rescuers who Yad Vashem has recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. The plaque included your date of birth only, so I assumed you were still alive.

I started writing this letter at that time. My intent was to express our profound and heartfelt gratitude for your humanitarian deeds. Indeed, my sister, my brother, and I are among the hundreds of Jewish children who owe our lives to you. During my first attempt to write to you, I had great difficulty composing the letter and tears kept running down my cheeks onto the paper. Unfortunately, even if I find all the right words to finish this letter now, it is too late for you to read it. In the meantime, Rosi, too, has passed away.

The only thing left for me to do is to pay tribute to your humanitarian actions, your compassion for the Jewish people, and your fearless courage in the face of extreme danger.

© 2016 Harry Markowicz. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.