Simone Solomon Soria - Life during the Holocaust

 By Simone Solomon Soria

            I was born in a shtetl, a small village where many Jews lived, Comalovo in Czechoslovakia November 1930 during the Depression.   Comalovo was a typical shtetl as described by Shalom Aleichem in “Fiddler on the Roof”.  The Jews there lived an Orthodox life; the village was located near the Hungarian and Rumanian borders in the Carpathian Mountains.  My parents, Favel (Paul) and Chaya (Helen), came from large families.  My father’s parents had 14 children but eight died at birth.  My mother was one of 18 children; her father was the mayor of the village for 35 years.  In Comalovo, my father was a shepherd, but that year my father went to Belgium to look for work.  My mother and I joined him April 1933.  We first lived in a small village, Peronne-lez-Binche, where my father worked in a coal mine. My brother Charles was born there in 1934.  In 1935 we moved to Brussels.

            We were poor but a happy family of six- my brother Charles, my sister Leona (Lee), born in Brussels in 1936, and my brother, Maurice, born also in Brussels in 1938.  Then May 10, 1940 everything changed.  German warplanes were flying very low over Brussels.  We were all in the street looking up. As a nine-and-a-half year old I felt the tension of the tragedy in the air and unexplained fear.  The adults knew what it meant if we were going to be invaded.  They remembered WWI.  That day we did not go to school, and I worried about it because I loved school.  By the afternoon, the Belgian authorities had rounded up all the Czech men and women living in Brussels.  My parents were taken but my mother was released because she told them that she had four children.  Later that evening, they released my father after my mother and I (I went because I spoke French) pleaded at the station and told them we were Jews and that we had nothing to do with Czechoslovakia.  The other people were never heard of again.

            The next day, my uncle Mendel left for France.  His wife and eight children were still in Czechoslovakia; they all died in concentration camps.  Of all the relatives in Czechoslovakia, over 100; my grandmother, my uncles, my aunts, and my cousins, only one uncle and two cousins survived the concentration camps.  Belgians thought that by escaping to France they would be safe.  They thought that France was a strong country and could not be taken over by the Germans.  Because my uncle Mendel left one day before us, he was able to reach Casablanca, Morocco, where he spent the next five years as a free man.  We did not leave that day because my father wanted to pick up his paycheck for us to escape.  The second day my parents packed our feather beddings and a few necessities and we fled to France by train.  The six of us and my Tante Manya, Uncle Joe and their son Eli, (their twin girls, Leona and Rosa, stayed in a children’s home in Brussels; they were 1 year old), joined us and also with us came my cousin Simone.  She had come from Czechoslovakia a few years earlier.  Her mother, four brothers and a sister all died in concentration camps.

            When we went to the train station to leave Brussels, there were thousands of people who were also trying to escape.  We did not want to separate.  Finally after six hours, all 10 of us were able to get on a train leaving for France.  The train was overloaded.  The train would stop, people would get off to stretch or look for food, and then the train took off without a warning.  That is how some families were separated.  My father never let any of us get off. When he got off, we all got off.  When we got to Arras in the northern part of France, a bomb fell on the train next to ours.  After a few days, the train was going very slowly being so over loaded, we arrived late at night in a small town Saint Paul.  There was talk that the Germans were closing in on us.  That evening only mothers with young children were allowed to board the train going to Africa.  We got on it and we were able to sneak in my father, my uncle and my cousin Simone who was 16.  But the train never took off.  The rails a few yards ahead of us had been bombed, so we were moved to a small room at a police station.  We stayed there for the night and hoped to continue the trip the next morning.  That night only children were able to sit or sleep on the bags, bundles and suitcases.  Adults slept standing and some even holding infants.  In the morning the Germans had invaded the area.

            Saint Paul was a town of 4,000 which changed to 60,000 with all the refugees.  Many of the refugees took over an abandoned castle.  We were waiting for transportation to go back to Brussels, but after 15 days my parents decided to just start walking back to Brussels.  We walked for six days.  Each day we walked about 30 km.  We walked through towns that had been bombed.  People were looting stores for food and other items.  The only thing my father took besides food, was a baby buggy, which we used to push my younger brother and my sister.  We stopped every night to sleep in a church, a convent, or a school.  The last 60 km. we were able to get a ride in the back of a truck.  When we got back in Brussels, we found our apartment empty; people who thought that we were not coming back had ransacked it.

            It was a changed Brussels under the German occupation.  Everything was rationed and we had to stay in line for everything.  The Germans occupied Belgium for four years.  In 1941 they made us, the Jews, wear the Jewish Star, black on yellow, on all our clothes – jackets, blouses, shirts, dresses, and coats.  Then a curfew was declared; no Jews were to be in the streets after 6 o’clock in the evening.  Once I saw a German soldier kick a young boy in the street because he did not have the Jewish Star on his shirt, he had it only on his jacket.

            In July 1942 they started to take young people (Jews) to “work”.  We believed it  but it turned out to a concentration camp, which we found out after.  Some young people had the intuition not to believe the letter and did not report at the North Station where they were to meet.  They went into hiding.  The next day a German truck came to the house and picked up the whole family of those who did not show up.

            One night in July I had a nightmare that my cousin Simone, whom I loved and admired very much, had received one of those letters.  The next morning we went shopping for my brother’s upcoming birthday.  When we came back, there was a letter for her.  My parents and my aunt and uncle tried to tell her to go into hiding, but she did not want to for fear that they would come and take us.  My parents bought her a new watch, she packed a suitcase, and my parents, my aunt and uncle all took her to the train station.  I was not allowed to go with them because I had to stay home to watch my brothers, sister, and my cousins.  I walked to the corner with her and then watched her go as far as I could see, until she disappeared around the next corner.  I did not cry, I did not want her to feel worse.  I was l1 and–a-half years old.  That night I cried to sleep.  For the next two-and-a-half years I had her picture under my pillow and every night I asked G-d to help her and to bring her back to us.

            After the war we found out that the train, with all the young people, would leave the station and go north to Malines.  There, the young men and women were stripped of all their belongings and clothes, put into boxcars, and shipped to the different concentration camps.  After the war, someone who came back from Auschwitz said that he saw Simone the last week before liberation.  I never saw her again.

            After the young people, the Germans started to take men.  In September 1942,  Jewish children were not allowed to go to school.  A week later, we went into hiding in Rixensart, near Waterloo.  My father didn’t believe that we were in trouble, being a family with children, they wouldn't take us.  So he stayed behind.  The next morning my mother sent me back to the city to get my father.  When I got back to our ghetto street (we lived there by choice) the street was like a ghost town.  That night the Gestapo had taken all the Jews away, men, women, and children, from our street.  Being alone, my father was able to hide on the three-story apartment roof.  So when I got there a Christian family told me what had happened.  My father was not there for he had gone to join us in hiding.  As I was riding the streetcar to go back where my family was, I was so scared for my father and afraid to be caught.  Trying not to think of anything, I counted all the houses and trees until I got to Rixensart.  One day my father was walking with my little brother Maurice who was 4 years old at the time.  They crossed a German soldier on the street and he greeted them, as people do in small towns.  My father said hello.  After my father and brother got back, Maurice asked my father why did he say hello to the German soldier if the Germans do not like us.  He was so smart not to have asked that in the street!

            My father and Uncle Joe paid Rene a large amount of money to rent the two room apartment for all nine of us.  My twin little cousins, Leona and Rosa, were 3 yrs old by then.  They were placed in a convent, where they stayed through the rest of the war.  This man, Rene, was a communist and did not like the Germans.  In the winter of 1942 the Russians were losing, so he changed and became a Black shirt, a collaborator with the Germans.  Rene, his wife, and daughter who was about 29 years old, were helping us at first.  For each errand they charged.  They told my parents that I should stay with them in the same village and of course pay them very well for it.  My parents were afraid to say no.  I was not treated well there, but I did not tell my parents.  At the table they would eat well but not serve me.  One day we went to see my family to drop something off.   As we were ready to leave I could not take a step, I felt paralyzed.  So my parents left without me.  The next day I was fine but I did not tell them.  A few days later, November 1942, from things that Rene had said, my parents felt it was time to move.  In the middle of the night we left to stay at the landlady’s relative’s house.  In the morning we took a train for another province, the Hainaut.  My aunt, uncle and cousin went to one village, and we went to another one.  We moved many times after that.  After the war, we found out that the morning after we had left Rixensart, the Gestapo had come to look for Jews!  Yes, Rene had denounced us.  Also his daughter was one of the women that the Belgians shaved her hair off completely. This is what they did to women who collaborated with the Germans.

            We went to the Hainaut.  We also went to Peronne-lez-Binche, the village where my father had worked in a mine when he first came to Belgium.  The chief of police was willing to help my father but not the rest of the family.  We found out that after the war, the villagers hung him on the town square of the village for being a collaborator.  We left Peroone-lez-Binch for Bray, another village.  Since we were in hiding, we did not even have ration stamps to buy anything.  We had no food and we were hungry.  My mother went to the priest and to the mayor of the village to ask for some bread and milk for the children.  Also a couple, Jules and Mathilde Dufransnes and a policeman helped my family.  They risked their own lives to help us.  My parents sent my brother Charles, who was then 8 years old, by bus to a village about an hour away.   He asked for help for food from an uncle who was also in hiding.  Unfortunately, he came back empty-handed.  
     The next two and a half years my parents and I moved eight times.  The Resistance, the underground army also called the Maquis, got my father a job in the coal mine, under a false name. 

            I was placed in Maurage where I lived with this family, Ana and Vasil, a Czech couple who owned a café.  There I worked in the café and cleaned the house.  I was 12 years old then.  The first night at the house, Vasil’s wife, Ana was away.  That night Vasil tried come in my bed.  I was scared but somehow I found myself strong enough to push him away.  I was lucky, he did not insist, and he never tried again.  
     While at the café I served German soldiers that would come in for lemonade or a beer.  One day, my mother came from the other village to see me in the café.  I served her a drink like I would any customer.  I tried not to look at her because there were soldiers in the café too and they might have suspected something.  I wanted to hug her but I could not.  It was getting, dark, and so my mother had to leave without our having talked or touched each other.  Sometimes the solders would give me one or two oranges.  It was very special because no one had oranges, only the soldiers had them.  I never ate them.  I gave them away because they came from them.

            After four months I went back to my family to help with getting some food.  I went to France by train with Mathilde, once or twice a week, going from farm to farm to try to exchange coffee beans for milk, bread, or butter.  I did this for about three months.  I was young and I did not look Jewish, being blond and green eyes.  Therefore, I did not need identification papers.   It was easier for me to lie, at the borders, to the authorities and Germans soldiers.  A few times at the border of Belgium and France, I was told to wait on the side until my family would join me.  But as soon as the Germans did not look I’d run away in the dark back into the train.  Luckily there were different soldiers every time.  A few times the French customs officers would search me and find my food that was hidden in the vertical pockets of my slip that my mother had made me.  They would then confiscate everything.  That was sad for me to return home empty-handed.  Once, returning from one of those trips from Amiens to Paris and to Mons, our train from Paris had left in front of the train carrying German soldiers.  By mistake the Underground Army derailed our train.  Luckily I was in the last wagon, but in the front of the train many people were killed or hurt.

            October 1943, I was placed in hiding by an Enghein engineer, who was from the Maquis. I was on a farm in Thoricourt with Adolphe and Filmene Spiltoir, their daughters Lucie and Marie, and their granddaughter Adolphine.  I was there 11 months until the war was over.  I worked on the farm, getting up and 3:30 or 4 in the morning like everyone else.   I milked the cows, set the table for meals, washed dishes, helped with the laundry, ironing, and gardening, cleaned the stables, took drinks to the fields, helped in the fields, and in the evening knitted socks for the family.  One of my jobs, early in the morning, was to hide one of the pigs that was not declared to the Germans.  At night, I had to take him back to the stable.  I used to kind of ride him like a horse.  When he got fat enough to be killed, I lost my animal friend.  The Spiltoir family was good to me.  They risked their lives by hiding me.  I know that I would do the same for other people, but the scary part is one never knows how one would react when the time comes for action! At first the Spiltoir family was going to tell people that I was the daughter of their daughter who lived in Paris.  Then they decided to say that I was an orphan from France.  My first name, Simone, never changed, but my last name of course had to be changed to Desnoix, Spiltoir and others, which I do not remember.  Every night I prayed and asked G-d to watch over my family, my cousin Simone and my friends, and that soon we would be back together. 

            Also, when I first got to the farm, they said they had never seen a Jew before.  They asked me how come I did not have any horns.  On Sundays the two daughters, Marie and Lucie,  the granddaughter Adolphine, and I would walk about three miles to a small chapel.  It was like a pilgrimage every Sunday.  They held a rosary in their hands and prayed all the way.  They gave me a rosary too and I moved my beads when they moved theirs.  Once we got to the chapel, we circled it three times and then they would give me some change to throw inside.  I enjoyed those walks because it gave me time to think of my family and the life we had in Brussels.  Sometimes I would be thinking and trying to understand why did the Germans want to kill us?  Why?  My parents were good people and never hurt anyone.  Why?  Evenings at the farm we would often listen to BBC radio while someone would guard the door.  We were not allowed by the Germans to listen to British broadcasts, but what joy to hear General DE Gaulle who was in England during the war, saying “Courage on les aura les bochues.”  I t gave us hope.      
      My brothers , Charles (8 years old) and Maurice (4 years old), were first placed in a convent. Then they were placed in a small farm in Chaussee, Notre Dame, in the Hainaut, with a couple, Robert and Mariette Host. They had no children.  The night the Underground Army people took my sister to place her on a farm and she was crying.  They could not get her to stop and she was so scared.    I was not far away from her farm, so they came to pick me up to help quiet her down.  After I held her a little, she fell asleep and they took me back to my farm.  I did not see her again until after the war.

            Summer 1944 the British and American planes were flying very low more and more, bombing important German sites.  We were not afraid because that meant that Liberation was nearer and nearer for us.  Finally, September 4, I believe, the American tanks came into our village.  It was one of the most beautiful sites to see them!  No one in the village spoke English and none of the soldiers spoke French; I became the interpreter with Yiddish.  I found an American Jewish soldier who spoke Yiddish.  Every day after the liberation I would stare at the road hoping to see me family come to pick me up.  
             Four days later, which felt like a century, my mother came to get me.  They were all alive.  My mother had to walk all the way to my farm, for there was no transportation.  Everything had been bombed.  From my farm,  my mother and I walked to the village where my sister was.  Mariette and Robert did not want her to leave them.  They begged my mother to let her live with them for always.  They loved her very much as their own child.  Of course that could not be, but my mother agreed to let her stay with them another few months since we could not go back to the capital yet. 
             In December 1944 we went back to Brussels.  The British had liberated the capital.  There we found our apartment empty again, this time it was done by the Nazis.  But of course that did not worry my parents, as long as we were together and healthy we could always start again.  The Germans with V-1s and V-2s were still bombing us.  
             Finally in May 1945 the war was over.   Once back in Brussels the children went back to school.  We had missed two and a half years of school.  When I had gone into hiding I had finished the fifth grade.  When I came back, I went into second semester of seventh grade. Then I skipped eighth grade and went into ninth grade.  I had caught up to my regular grade.  Right after the war, my parents applied for a visa to go to the United States.  I did not want to go to the United States.  Young Jewish people after the war wanted to go to Israel, to help Israel.  I wanted to go too but my parents would not let me.  We received our visa in 1949 to go to America.  My parents’ brothers and sisters who had gone earlier from Czechoslovakia to America at the end of the 1800’s had sponsored us and sent us tickets for the trip.   April 1949 we took a train from Brussels to Ostende, then a boat to Dover, England and then a train to London.  After two days in London, we took a train to Southhampton.  Then, we took the biggest boat at the time, ”The Queen Elizabeth” to New York.  In New York, my mother’s brother was waiting for us to take us to Cleveland, Ohio.  The family had changed their last name from Slyomovic or Slomovits to Solomon and so we did too.

            After the war we never talked to friends or relatives of where we were or what we did in hiding.  I never told my children either until 1975, when I was asked to talk to fifth and sixth grade students in Des Moines who had read a story about a child during the Holocaust.  Since then, I speak on the holocaust and my experiences at schools and churches whenever I am asked to do so.  If an honorarium is given, I ask them to send it to the Holocaust Museum in Washington or I plant trees in Israel in the name of the school or the church.

            In 1981 I attended the first holocaust Survivor Gathering in Israel.  It was an unforgettable experience! In 1991 I attended the First Hidden Children gathering in New York, both of these being a very emotional meeting.  In the ‘80s I was asked to be on a panel to discuss the Holocaust at Drake University.  The topic was “who rescued us and what motivated them (the rescuers)”.  First of all, those people were heroes.  They risked their lives and their family’s lives to save us.   Sometimes they were friends but most of the time they were total strangers.  If they had been caught they would have been shot or sent to a camp.  I often think about it, and it really scares me.  Would I do the same thing for others? My first reaction is of course I would, but the scary part is one never really knows until it happens!  Thinking back, I think there were at least one to five reasons that motivated the rescuers: 1. The compassion to save a human life. 2. The hatred that many Belgians had for the invaders.  3.  They did want a child and did not have one of their own. 4. Someone to help in their house, farm or factory for free labor. 5. Monetary, they would be paid for everything they did.  My family and I have experienced all of them.

            My parents were also heroes, my heroes.  The Germans wanted to kill us.  They defied the Germans by going into hiding, by separating from their children, so that the chances were better of surviving.  I remember hearing my parents in 1942 talking about us, the children.  My father was telling my mother that they should remember the children’s birthmarks in case we would be separated for a while.  You see, there never any doubt in our minds that the Germans were going to lose and we would be liberated one day.  We never lost hope!

            After the war in September 1945, when I was in the first semester of ninth grade, my father decided that I should learn a trade, diamond cleaving.  Being the oldest child, it was an investment in me so that I could then teach my father and my brothers.  There were no women in diamond cleaving but my father had a friend who found a cleaver who was willing to teach me.  This was a trade where there were only men but also it was usually in the family, from father to son.  I started to teach my father a little, but then we moved to the United States.  In the States my brothers and sister went to school and never got to work in diamonds.  In Cleveland I also learned diamond cutting, which I did until I got married in 1952.

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             On December 6, 2001, Simone Solomon Soria died of cancer.  She is survived by her husband Mario Soria, and four children; Monique, Mireille, Michele and Ricky.  Each of Simone’s children has raised a family also.  This essay was transcribed by Rick Soria for the internet in honor of the 10^th year anniversary of her passing.  Her legacy and love for all will continue to be cherished by her family and friends.                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                              June 30, 2011