Pauline "Lilly" Brull (Belgium)
I was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on May 24, 1929. My home life, childhood, and family were all perfect, they were ideal. It was a wonderful place to grow up. I was the oldest child, and I had one sister who was seven years younger than me.
We lived in Antwerp, where my father worked in the diamond business. He came to Antwerp as a young man and married my mother, who was born there. My grandfather had come to Antwerp in the late 1880s once the city had become a world diamond center. People had gone to Antwerp from Eastern Europe to make a living, and life was beautiful there. Belgium was a small, but very pleasant country, with a wonderful seashore that we went to every summer. I had lots of cousins, and we would spend three months near the sea. It couldn’t have been better. We saw each other as a family every day of the week, and every evening we got together.
Life was good until we started hearing Hitler’s speeches on the radio. We could also hear the crowds screaming out their fierce reactions to what he said. People would faint when they heard him; such was his appeal to the German masses. My father realized it was going to be dangerous to be Jewish and stay in Europe. Everyone knew that Hitler had outlined everything he would do in his book, Mein Kampf, and that one of his major goals was to eliminate all the European Jews.
Since my father had a brother in the United States, he applied for a visa to immigrate there in mid-1930s. Other relatives of ours applied to go there as well. The United States had severe immigration laws at the time, and we were told we would have to wait eight years to go. This was four years before the war began, so we never made it out before the war.
On May 10, 1940, at around five o’clock in the morning, I woke up to what sounded like barrels rolling overhead. I saw smoke outside the windows and went to look. Above us, streams of airplanes were flying in formation, dropping bombs as they flew along. We lived in a neighborhood of apartment buildings and they were all hit, one after another. This was when luck payed off, because at this point you had to be lucky to survive. You needed ingenuity and money, but more than anything you needed to be lucky.
My parents saw what was happening and went to meet with my grandparents and other relatives. They decided that everyone had to leave Antwerp, but not as a full family. It would be better if we left in small groups and go to France, which supposedly had better armed forces than Belgium. Belgium was not very well protected.
Two days after the war began in Belgium, my father, mother, sister and I left our apartment with two small suitcases. We left everything else behind as if we were walking to the supermarket or mailing a letter. We walked to the train station and waited for any train that could take us out of Antwerp. By this time most of the trains coming through were full of soldiers heading to the front, but after several hours, a passenger train arrived.
We rode for hours on the train, and arrived at one of the major Belgian railway stations in the city of Gent. We were told we had to get off the train and that train transportation would be halted. Everything in Gent was dark because by then, there was a rule that you couldn’t use lights because of the bombings. We saw a small hotel and got the only room available, in the attic. We just got to our room when another bombing began, so we ran down into the basement. That basement saved us because it was so deep and reinforced that we weren’t hit. The entire area around the station was destroyed, but not that basement. We stayed on the floor in the basement all night, listening to the bombs overhead and the buildings as they crashed to the ground all around us. The next morning, after the bombing stopped, people dug at the debris to help us out. We were on our own after that.
There was no way out of the city that day so we stayed for 24-hours. We found another room in Gent for the night and left for Dunkirk the next morning. As we walked away from the hotel, a bomb went through it, missing us by a hair.
Our goal was to cross into France, which took days. We used any transportation we could; trucks, trolley cars, buses, private cars, horse and buggy, anything that could take us. There were lines and lines of refugees going in the same direction. Most of the time we walked, and when the bombers would fly low overhead they’d shoot at civilians walking along the roads.
We finally arrived at the French border, where the French were letting everyone in. Once in France, we had to wait with the other hundreds of thousands of people waiting to find transportation deeper into France. My father, who beautifully managed to get us out of difficulties during the war, somehow found transportation very quickly, and got us to Dunkirk. A major battle was beginning there, with British troops coming to help the French after the Germans had invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. By the time we went to Dunkirk, there was full time fighting and bombing going on there.
We finally found a train to take us to Paris, with our main goal of getting to Paris first to meet up with my mother’s parents. They’d gone there with my great grandfather to put him in a home. He couldn’t complete the full trip because he was close to 90-years-old. We used various sorts of transportation, and eventually got on a train headed for Paris. The Germans bombed the train and the rail lines along the way, so we had to sit on the train for four days without food, water, or help, until they could repair the train and we could continue into Paris.
We arrived in Paris and met up with my grandparents. My father knew Paris well because he often did business there. We’d lived in Paris a couple of years when I was young so my parents knew the city well. We stayed in Paris for a few days, then continued on with the goal of going south to Marseille. Marseille was a port city on the Mediterranean that had two advantages; it was a port, so we could get out on a ship, and there was an important American consulate there. If our papers could move forward, we could get our visas there.
We continued the same way: looking for transportation wherever we could find it. Mostly we slept in railway stations. Sometimes, if we arrived at a city with a consulate, my sister and I would stay in the train station with our grandparents while my parents stood in line in front of the consulate. They were trying to see if any country would give us an entrance visa. No consulate ever gave out a visa. They’d make people stand with their doors locked, sometimes for days on end, then someone might quickly open the door and stick out their head to tell everyone there were no visas. That was that.
We continued this way until we reached the south of France. By that time, Paris had been occupied, and France was divided in two; half was with General DE Gaulle, who was fighting the Germans, and the other half was controlled by Marshall Philippe Pétain, who’d been a hero in World War I and was a great admirer of the Nazis. Pétain believed that France could only survive if it went with the Nazis. He made an agreement with the Germans that they would take control of France, but Pétain would control his area, which stretched to the south of France and included Marseille, where we were headed.
One of the problems with this was that the French police was made to do the work of the Nazis in that area, and they were even worse than Nazis, if that’s possible. They were looking for Jews and resistance fighters, anybody they could send back to Germany. It was very tricky to get through that area of France and down to Marseille.
Our journey through France continued though, and at one point we rode on an open beer truck to the Spanish border, high in the Pyrenes Mountains. We didn’t feel the stress of the war there, and the people there took wonderful care of us. We were able to relax for four or five days before we continued to Marseille.
We finally arrived to Marseille by train. We arrived in the evening and as we got off the train, the Vichy police arrested us. They took us into a closed room and interrogated us, telling us that refugees were no longer allowed to enter Marseille and that we would be put into a French detention camp. These were holding places in France for people who were on their way to the Nazi concentration camps. Somehow, my father convinced them that we didn’t plan on staying in Marseille, and that we’d only gone there to change trains on our way to a town called Aix-en-Provence.[1] How he remembered that town’s name I don’t know. The French police believed his story that we had cousins and other family in Aix-en-Provence, and that we were going to stay with them.
We stayed overnight in the locked room, and in the morning the police put us on the train to Aix-en-Provence, where we arrived a short time later. I remember walking to the main street and sitting in a café wondering what we would do. We got a room in a boarding house, and after a few days my father found out that trollies went down to Marseille, and that he was going to take one to see if we could sneak in that way. He did, and realized that was the way to go because nobody was watching the trollies. In Marseille, he found an empty building in a bad neighborhood near the port, where he thought nobody would look for refugees. He rented a few rooms for all of us, and a couple more in case other relatives showed up in Marseille.
We traveled to Marseille on trollies in twos, so we wouldn’t be noticed. We lived in the room my father had found in Marseille for about one year while we waited for the visas. It was one room we used as a bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom, all in one. There was no food in Marseille due to the deal Pétain had made with the Germans, which included an agreement that all the food grown in the south of France would be sent to Germany. We got food stamps and stood in lines, sometimes all day for one loaf of bread. Getting food was difficult, but my father was very ingenious and discovered a woman on one of the little streets, a woman who sold chickens, ducks, and gees, and would go there in the middle of the night to buy eggs from her. He would fill his pockets with eggs, none of which ever cracked.
Every day in Marseille, my parents and grandparents would go to the American consulate to see if anyone had become eligible for a visa. Sometimes I went with my parents, but the scenes there were terrible. They refused people visas for any reason at all, such as even a spot on your face. I saw people go into hysterics because they’d applied for a visa and found out they weren’t going to get one. They knew they were doomed.
After about a year, at the end of 1941, my parents, sister and I received visas, but my grandparents were refused because they only wanted parents with small children. They didn’t want older people. It was getting difficult to live in Marseille because we feared the Germans would invade the city any day.
My father took care of all the paperwork in order for us to leave, and then we had to make a choice between two cargo ships that were leaving, one on May 6th and one on May 10th. My father said we’d go on the May 6th ship, no matter what. As soon as our ship sailed, they closed the port at Marseille. We were on the last ship to leave, and if we’d have waited those four days, we never would have gotten out of Europe.
My other grandmother had, in the meantime, arrived in Marseille with my aunt and her children. My aunt had also applied to leave, but her visa didn’t come through. My other grandmother, my father’s mother, was allowed to come with us because she was a widow. The ship was a creaky old cargo boat with bunks in these huge halls. There was no food besides chickpeas, which they used for all sorts of things. The ship was supposed to hold 500 people, though we had 2,500 onboard. We couldn’t go directly to the United States due to all the naval battles in the Atlantic, so we sailed to Martinique, a French possession, and from there we had tickets to New York. By then my father was almost completely out of money, though just before we left the French government took everything else he had and put it in a French bank.
The voyage took three weeks, which actually wasn’t unpleasant since we were getting out. However, the night before we were supposed to land in Martinique, while we were sleeping, everyone heard gunfire and ran out on deck. We’d been surrounded by British warships, shooting in the air, and British sailors were boarding our ship. When we’d first boarded, my mother had noticed a large group of nuns getting on the ship, though we never saw them for the duration of the trip. As the British troops boarded the ship, the nuns were running around on the deck. It turned out that they were actually Gestapo officers, men disguised as nuns, who’d been on their way to Martinique to open a Gestapo office there. They had weapons and everything with them. The British arrested them and took them off the ship.
We were then sent to Trinidad, a British colony. By then the crew had been removed from the ship because of the incident, which was a real espionage plot. The passengers were left to fend for themselves. We saw small canoes coming to us; native people who brought meats and vegetables and fruit, which we hadn’t seen for a long time. That night we had a feast, a wonderful meal, and no one ever knew if it was delivered or accidental, but the food was poisoned. The next day, everyone on the ship was deadly sick, and my mother actually passed out. My father revived her by running to the kitchen and returning with a bag of salt. It took a few days to recoup from all this.
My uncle in New York saw the story on page one of the New York Times, and since he knew we were on that ship he sent tickets to us for another ship. After we recovered, the men were taken off the ship and put in barracks to be examined while the women were put up in family homes. They really took great care of us, they were lovely. We were eventually sent back to the ship and sailed to America.
We stayed with my aunt and uncle for a few months, while my father tried to figure out what to do. All of his money had been taken by France just before we left, and the Brits had confiscated the diamonds he’d brought with him from being in the diamond business. It took eight months, but he finally did get the diamonds returned to him and he could once again work in the industry. We moved to the Bronx, and life started for us again.
I went to school in New York and graduated from Hunter College. I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan where I met my husband, who was also a Holocaust Survivor. He was getting his PhD in engineering. He’d been in the Free French Navy during the war and had been an aircraft carrier pilot trained in the United States. After he got his PhD, we moved to Philadelphia, where we lived for many years. We moved to Israel after my husband was asked to start an engineering school at Tel Aviv University, which was just then being built. I lived in Israel for 32 years. I returned to the United States in 2004.
[1] A town just north of Marseille.
