Righteous Gentile Essay This is a story of a brave family who saved many Jews during the holocaust. These people are called righteous gentiles, they were non-jews who risked their lives and gave the jews assistance until the atrocity had ceased. I’m writing this essay to pay reverence to them and all they went through.
It all started in late August of 1942 Alice Van Damme witnessed Jews being rounded up and put on trucks near the railway station in her hometown, Antwerp. During the chaos, she heard someone talk about a man by the name of Doctor Content. She had asked her parents if she could contact this man and after they said it was fine she got in touch with the man. She was put in contact with the Sobolski family. The father had been deported already so all that was left was Mrs. Sobolski, her mother-in-law and her two children, Marcel who was four and Johnny, who was a year and a half old. Alice took the children and Mrs. Sobolski and her children home to her parents and every week would come back to Mrs. Sobolski’s mother-in-law, food and water. Alice brought the kids and the mom to her sister Laura’s house in Lockeron.
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Sobolski asked the family to save two jewish boys, Solomon who was nine and Hirsch who was fifteen years old. On Jewish New Year, the boys’ father gave them a prayer book and made them promise to write all their prayers in it. Rene Govaerts took the boys back to their home then he smuggled them to the van Dammes’. They stayed for about a year and a half before Govaerts came back with clothes, money and some fake documents for their parents. They were hidden in a safe place where they were later found by Adrienne and Gaston van Damme. Later on, Alice’s mother had become an active courier for a resistance group. Soon after, Alice brought two women named Karfiol and Freifeld to her