Jacques Weisser

Jacques Salomon Weisser was born in Antwerp, Belgium to Jakob Weisser and Martha Mandelbaum, both of Polish-Jewish descent. In the summer of 1942, following the Western Campaign, his father was deported to labor camps in Northern France where he was forced to work as slave labor for Organisation Todt, dedicated to the construction of the Atlantic Wall. Weisser would remain with his mother in Antwerp until September 11, 1942, where she was arrested in public and later deported to and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the Holocaust. With the arrest of his mother, and lacking both his parents, he was rescued by an unknown individual and brought to the children's home of Meisjeshuis. The exact circumstances surrounding both the arrest of his mother and his retrieval remain unclear. On September 21, 1942, twenty five Jewish children who were with Weisser in Meisjeshuis were arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they died. Weisser and some of the surviving children were then moved from Meisjeshuis to the Sint-Erasmus hospital in Borgerhout. He remained here in hiding up until June 1944 when he was discovered and arrested by the Germans; Weisser would survive the Holocaust and was not deported, in part due to laws for the status of orphaned infants. His father would survive several concentration camps (notably Auschwitz-Birkenau as well as Buchenwald in its final days) and a death march during the German retreat from Poland, reuniting with Weisser in 1945.[4]

Jacques Weisser (right) in hiding in Belgium with Bill Frankenstein (born Bernard Baron, left), 1944.

Jacques Weisser (left) and Bill Frankenstein (right) either side of an American soldier following the liberation of Belgium, 1944.