My mother was born in Poland and moved to Berlin when her elder brother had moved there and had a business of high fa And she was involved with the leftist movement and couldn't stay there anymore because they were being hunted.

And not just as Jews, but because of the movement.

And she went to escape to Luxemburg.

My father, as a graduate in in Prague, his name was Maurice, he left for Luxembourg as well.

And that's where they met and married.

And after a certain time, they went to Metz, in where we had family, because they had no way of making a good living in Luxembourg.

And and that must have been in the beginning of the thirties.

And I was born in 1933, in Metz.

My second sister And then from Metz they went to Antwerp in Belgium.

My father had a business with three brothers.

My mother was a home keeper and made sure that the kids are okay.

And, you know, it was a fairly normal life in France.

I hadn't I mean, I can't reme France at about age four for Antwerp, in Belgium, where my father was relocated because of his business.

My oldest sister was one year younger than I was.

And the next one, two years younger.

I remember not so much, but we had a stove that kept us warm i and it was working with these wood coke, which was comes like in the shape of eggs which was delivered to the basement through a grate.

Also the things that my father did professionally were the supplies for the sewing trade, you know, tailors and fashion and all kinds.

And I was always sneaking into the storeroom to look at things.

And one day I decided I'm going to sew something on a machine.

And it had a peddle underneath and so on.

But everything was a bit too big for me.

So I took two pieces of cloth and I pushed it and until my finger got under the needle and it broke.

And then and I was taken scre And they pulled it out.

And then my father t not going to go in there again without me.

You know?

So that was a big lesson.

Well, in my family, several languages were spoken.

And one of them was Yiddish.

So obviously we were Jewish-related.

And most of our some were religious, some were not.

And we at that age, I don't remember if Israel was a factor in it, but we definitely were Jewish, you know.

And I remember once going to the synagogue when it was Simchat Torah where they had the flags, the apples And it was a happy memory which stayed with me, you know.

I was in a public school where Flemish or Dutch, which is the same, was the language.

And no, One uncle was a very religious person and he very seldom would come and never eat in our place, you So but otherwise 64 00:03:15,895 --> 00:03:16,596 quite, you know, modern company, modern family.

As far as anti-Semitism in my earliest days, I hardly had any occurrences, except once some person asked me, are you Jewish?

Or whatever.

And I saw it was not a very nice person.

I said, I don't know what you're talking about.

And then he went away.

Until the beginning of the Second World War, life was fairly normal.

And, you know, we had no real problems.

We, we had good food.

We had a home and a business, my father.

But when the Germans came to Belgium, everything changed.

And the Belgian population, the Belgian government the Belgian police, all cooperated with the Germans.

And all the Israeli I mean, the Jewish people had the stamp in Dutch and French, a red stamp on their ID cards and any documents that were issued.

And this already made everything difficult.

And then we had to wear a star in the street.

And the yellow star.

And immediately we you become you go on the defensive.

You know, your you you try to be aware Th ere was also a curfew that aft I think it was 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening, you couldn't go out of your house.

And that made life totally different.

And more inward, that you spend your time in at home most of the time.

What I cherish about my mother most is the way she cared about us.

The way the food was adjusted forced to eat something when food was scarce.

I couldn't eat cooked spinach.

My father was the same.

Maybe that influenced me.

And he called it ganzen dreck.

And that made it even Worse because German, French and Dutch and some Yiddish, which they thought was a secret language and so it.

Just a little thing.

My mother' but her Yiddish name was some Polish name.

I can't remember And my father's name was Moshe Avraham, but he was now called and I admired my father because being in the underground meant something important, you know.

Not not that he told me what he was doing, but I knew it was a dangerous thing, you know?

And so I have good memor And luckily I had what to do because when at Christmas time at school I was Akiba, the first "A," and I went to the tree and instead of taking I took the largest Meccano set, which is a kind of metal and bolts and nuts and motors and all kinds of things to build things.

And I and I used that wh en I was at home, apart from reading and all kinds of things that my parents would ask me to do.

I learned about the dangers of Nazism and anti-Semitism in a roundabout way, because of the curfew.

I was playing outside and I was a fairly good champ with marbles and the trees around and along the street had a kind of sandy area where we played.

And and as I was winning, we just continued and another guy was in and so on.

And then I realized it was too late.

And we all sneaked off.

My parents were so worried they thought I was caught by so And when I got home, I got the only punishment I ever had One big clap on my bottom from my father.

I think there must have been five red fingerprints there, and I didn't know.

Take it as unjust, It was such an important.

message that my life could have been take That's when I was explained how dangerous everything was.

How did they explain when you had to start wearing a yellow star and did that c behavior toward you?

Well, wearing the yellow star made a lot of people avoid us.

And it caused us to feel like outcasts.

You know, are they better than me?

You kno And I was better than the it it was difficult to kind of digest.

And so when I sometimes asked my father, well, what about this?

He says, well, some people are evil and some people are good.

And luckily I had the good people that saved my life.

My father was very active in the underground, which they call the Maquis, which is the French and the Belgian resistance.

And he was a person in charge of communications, which he that was taking back in kind of So it's on paper and disappeared My mother was part of it also.

When all the restrictions and my father was in the underground, I was told that before the Germans came, they had applied to go to England.

And nobody had foreseen that the Germans would come around the Maginot line and would be there within days.

So that was an impossible target to get to, you know, so escape was cut off.

And of course, all these happenings, of course, made me feel more and more that we were not in the right place, you know.

In August 1942, I was in the street with my father, which was like with trees and everything and cafes, music, people talking.

A lot of noise.

And and he was talking to a person that I didn't know.

A blonde person, and and I was a bit bored.

So I was looking at everything.

All of a sudden, dead silence in the s and people were running back and forth.

They were coming to get my father, who was part of the Maquis, which is the French-Belg resistance during the war.

He pushed me towards the person that he was talking to.

In a loud voice that the approaching Brownshirts, that the Belgians and the Blackshirts, the SS came towards us and in a loud voice, go to your father.

Excuse me.

He put his arm around my shoulders and we walked away.

He says, don't look back.

Everything will be okay.

I speculated after I'd been reading lots of things about the resistance, after the war that they were divided into two: the leftists and the Gaullists.

And the Gaullist, if they knew somebody they hated him even doubly.

And probably they were part of the cause of it.

But of course, I cannot be sure of that, you know.

But from what I read, it seems to be what happened.

And of course, I never saw my father again, you know, and and nor my mother.

After that I must've either passe I kind of got back to myself in the back of a truck in the middle of the night, driving through the forest.

And then we came to after quite a long time, I was hanging onto the wooden bench, bouncing up and down.

We stopped on a kind of bridge where there were four monsters, one on each corner.

Actually, they are dragons.

And for me as a kid, that was even more frightening.

Then creaking big gates were opened and we drove to a castle.

And I'd read all kinds of storie Monte Cristo and all kinds of other things that bad things could happen in a cas Then this big door opened, and the shadow of a monk.

I couldn't see his face because the yellow lig And he said, come on in, you're w Don't be afraid.

I was led to a dormitory, shown to a bed.

That's your pajamas.

These are the clothes.

And I couldn't sleep, of course I was crying.

I must have I had to go to the loo, but I was too afraid so the worst happened, to add to my misery.

Whilst I was in my very difficulties during the first period in the castle, and I was crying at night.

The priest that was in charge of the dormitory came and took me to the And then and said to me, you have to be strong.

You have to be ready for what He didn't say, when you don't meet your Mummy.

And make your father proud of you coping with what's happening.

And those few simple words Were for me something to lean on.

And I could cope with the situation.

And the next day I was shown around the place and taken to the office.

You are called Willy van Hamme.

Nobody knows that you are here.

We are keeping you safe until we can get you back to your family.

You will be taken to your class.

And, don't worry.

Mention that more about that.

Oh, yeah.

When I was given the the name and instruc part of the instructions was that I'll be showering on my own because that they didn't want to give to the other kids.

Then at a much later date I was with a group of kids that looked like m but I didn't think that they were Jewish kid And you know, it was such a normal thing.

So it was very smart of them to do that.

And and no, of c And we never discussed that with the other kids.

And you know, it's it was.

The the food that we were getting in the thing wasn't maybe not a Michelin type of thing, but it was pretty good And the prince himself used to come in and taste the soup if it was sufficientl You know, it was really, really taking good care of us.

And after a while I kind of got used to the place.

And the only thing that kept me from going maybe mad was the music.

Because I because I was a sopran a young kid.

I sang in the choir for the church in t And the music from Bach and from others kind of uplifted Because at home we had this huge wooden box, gramophone in it, and my father listened to tenors and operas, and so I had this background.

Then it reminded me of my home The prince used to have for orphans and that, and poor people, camps during the summer on these grounds.

And that was transformed as a full-time kind of location for orphans of the war.

And apart from myself, there were another 11 hidden, but I didn't know tha until much later.

And I learned a lot about the Catholic religion, because each day in the class there was a section for But the school was very high standard and, and I liked learning, of course, and the reading.

Yeah, the Nazis, of course, went everywhere to look.

So we were told if, not only me, everybody in the class so there wouldn't be any difference.

Everybody was told when the Germans come in and if you wake, don't move.

Just stay in you.

Because a lot of others were orphans of of soldiers.

So and they understood.

They knew who the enemy was.

So we were told to stay, not move.

And a small body, of course, is not a hiding You tell your parents where they were from.

Yes.

Okay.

In the castle, things weren't always that felt always that safe.

One night we were told the Germans are coming her They want to find a pilot that fell down in the area.

And they're coming to check.

So if they come into the dormito you just, even if you wake, you don't move.

You just stay the way you are under the covers.

And actually it happened.

They came in.

I was scared stiff because my nights weren't always full, full sleep, full of sleep, obviously.

And we stayed and we waited.

And then we heard the German language and the off yelling, do this, do that.

And then they left, you know, they stomp And then even then we didn't move, you know, for a long time.

And that happened twice during our stay there.

And so those were scary moments.

And, you know, it it was not just scary for me.

It was scary for all the children.

And because we were scared, we followed the orders as as we were told.

You know.

We stayed in the castle maybe a year and a half until the mother of one of the hidden children found out where it was and came for a visit.

And that was a dangerous thing for the prince, who the Germans would have killed him.

That very night we were taken away and put in different places.

I was transferred to the to another place, which was a boarding school, and also there we were a few, but not always the same ones that were in the other place.

And but I still didn't know that, you know, and that there were other kids like me, hidden.

And that school afterwards, when I did searches, was considered one of the top schools in Belgium, where the rich and the famous and the princes have their kids.

So I had an excellent education, which helped me of course later in life.

And so again, I was still And when we were taken to the cathedral after the singing, we were given a rare piece of cake, which we hadn't seen since you left our homes.

You know, so so I integrated with whatever was happening.

And so even today, I know more about Catholicism than I know of my ow religion, you know.

Yeah.

Well at night I used to ha Of course, I didn't know that about the camps and whatever of that, but I knew that they were taking Jewish people away.

And so it was, you know, and after a while, my worries turned into maybe fantasies.

Imagining after the war, all to be back together again.

And I only knew about two sister The third one was born after I was taken away.

And so it was kind of a survival technique or whatever you would call it, you know.

And I kept going until the end of the war.

And of course, I participated in everything that was happening there, you know, and we went for long walks in the forest.

And and in the forest once I saw i And apples was something we didn't see.

And and I yelled out, apples, of course, in Dutch.

And everybody looked at me and I ran.

So they all ran after me.

And then some of the apples weren't ripe, but they ate It was totally denuded.

And later on in life, when I met some of the people that were hidden with and we were talking to each other, he said, oh, you were the one that gave us all diarrhea with eating these green apples.

So when liberation came, I was transferred to France because I was a French-born person, in a place called Profondsart.

And there I was on my own.

I didn't know anybody who from my family And one day three girls were brought and they said, they're your sisters.

Two of them were hidden in Switzerland and one was hidden in the convent in Namur, Belgium.

And my older sisters, of course, remembered me and the youngest one I didn't even know existed.

And at the age of 12, 11, 12, I became the father of the family.

And we waited.

We wer had found an uncle in Melbourne, Australia, and we were told we will be sent to Australia.

We were sent to Australia on a Yugoslavian shi which is cargo and passengers, and went, which went first to Haifa, where the orphan that couldn't find any family.

And they were distributed among adoptive or kibbutzim and places like that.

And we stayed on the Mount Carme on a in a small hotel until the ship had unloaded whatever it was.

And then we were taken back and the captain kind of took him, took us under his arm, I should say.

And I was holding the steering some Yugoslavian.

And I still remember a few wor And that until we got to My uncle and aunt, which was not my real aunt because he, lost his wife and two sons to the Germans.

He was living in Berlin and kind of over lived in a, in a in a cellar which was like a dungeon throughout the war.

And he made it to Australia because he knew we had some relatives there.

And then in Australia I had to have a bar mitzvah.

And I didn't know anything.

So I was taught just the prayer for how to open the To which I repeated word by word anyway, and, and I got bar mitzvahed there.

You know, and there I went to high school, and from high school I went to college, which is now called M.I.T.

beca and and became an electronic engineer.

And I worked for RCA a few After I, during all that time I was earning fairly good money and I helped my sisters, you know and, and, and so on.

I felt I had a duty to look after them.

And and I managed.

I didn't have any youth.

I was working all through my high school.

All through my college.

I didn't have any, any spare for myself.

And that caused some other problems for me in later life because I had no way of how do you approach a woman?

How do you, how do you I had no no thing.

You Very nice to read about But it's is not the same thing as a mother or Then when the others were ready, we had booked already a ship from England to Israel because the boat from Australia would go to to England.

And we went to London.

I hated London.

Everything looked black.

And we then then we were told by the Jewish Agency there was a war going on for the Gaza War and they wouldn't let anybody in So we volunteered.

No, we don't t by the Jewish by the Israeli army.

Miriam was hidden in the convent And in the reconnaissance [acknowledgement]to the convent that she survived the war, she kept the name Maria, which she had, and I kept my name, Willy, that I had.

And the youngest one and that I found afterwards.

Because all the documents that we could recoup from the government in our searches, which I did for two weeks in a two week-stay in Belgium.

And this, you know, it was what I, I found out a lot of information fr school teacher that together with another 11 Jewish women, had saved nearly 5,000 children and hidden them during the war.

So and there was this lady kept a record in six books.

Each book was hidden in a different place.

And each book had some information about a child, either the age or the first name.

Another one had the second name and so on, so that people after the war could find out who these children are that were hidden.

Because they all had false names and I went to see the lady when she was already in her late eighties or in her mid eighties, and that was such a fantastic thing.

And she told me about all how they she had, her big sorrow.

Her husband was a Jewish lawyer and she was not Jewish.

And she said, we used to go to families, told them, prepare, prepare a sm valise with some clothes or a favorite toy, but not much And we will come and pick them up on that day.

Some days she said, she turned up and the family was gone, already taken away by the by the Germans.

She was called, Mademoiselle and everybody knew her as Mademoiselle.

And her real name was Andrée Geulen I also tried to find out who the resistance fighter was, who was with my father.

All the files of resistance, of police, of municipality and army Were closed by fiat by the Belgian government for 100 years.

All my research that I have in two huge folders and what are in my writings are will be given to me will be given to my sons.

And in 2042 or 20, 40 or whatever it is going to be, when the files will be open, they'll be able to go and find out.

Because there are many other reasons.

And they were put into camps and then whatever happened after And my two sisters, of course, were given to two families, and then they were given over after a year or so to t they were not really their child and then they were put into private families that kept them.

And I only found out where they were during the war when we met up in France.

Where we were sent to try and find the family, and so on.

Because you know.

Some of the family had made it to the States and some of the family was hidden in different places, like on a farm.

And I found a cousin in Paris, but that's much later.

Actually, he found me in Israel and ca And then every time I went to France I used to stay with them.

But it's.

And.

Of course, the family in Australia was safe also.

And most of the ones that survived I met much later in life after I was already in Israel.

Well, the thing that in to go to Israel was when I was studying in the Mel which was, it's a huge library.

Looks like a Roman edifice.

And it it was one block away from the college.

And I studied always in the same spot where were all the engineering and other things books w And there was a table with about eight or nine, varying, when they come in that area.

And one day they said, why don't you join us?

And I said, Well, I'm doing electronic engineering.

Oh, we are doing this engineerin we are doing that engineer So I joined them and they were all Jewish and they were all part of Hashomer Hatzair that wanted to form a gr to go to Israel.

So I joined their meetings, where they were being taught about Israel and we learned some songs and a few words of Hebrew.

We didn't know much Hebrew.

And when I worked for a few years, some of those others were already finishing their studies, but some of them were younger and hadn't yet finished their c We decided to wait till everybody was r And then I told my company where I was working that I'm going to leave for Israel on such and such a date.

And they said, well, why don't you stay?

You have a future here.

So the same thing was said to me by the fam said, no.

I have to do my bit so that the Jewish people will have a place to go to where there's no danger.

When I got to Israel, the idea was to go on a kibbutz, like the same as the other group of people.

Some went to Habonim kibbutz and some went to the the more leftist kibbutz, like me.

And I went to Kibbutz Nirim.

I tried my best in the kibbutz.

And I came to realize to have an ideal society ideal And not everybody was pull And that hurt me.

So I went to the meeting of the kibbutz, wh every Friday, and I said, I'm going to leave.

Because in a super society you need super men.

And I'm not a Superman.

I didn't want to mention An d I went to Eilat.

I was a sw And whilest on the kibbutz, the foreign volunteers, after working for three months re ceived a two-week tour of Israel.

And of course, because I spoke several European languages, I was accompanying them.

And of course, I always made sure that they would get to Eilat so I could go snorkeli I started I wanted to start a diving business, but I had no money.

I had not really good money because everything I had was given to the kibbutz.

It was.

So I got a loan fr Federation, Jewish Federation, of $5,000 and I could start a diving business.

So I bought a tent and some tools and a few tanks and a compressor and I started taking people on intro dives into the sea.

And started teaching a few people.

I don't think I thought of myself as a Holocaust survivor so much as a Holocaust Melbourne.

And then experience of my family made me want to somehow not make it not happen again.

And not happen again was, the only answer was Israel.

And that's what pushed me to go to Israel.

I think I spent nearly 40 years in Israel.

I met my wife in Israel The way I see the world or I saw the world or see the world is that it could happen again.

It's not difficult to to imagine And that made me feel that I have to be part of trying to avoid it.

And the only way we can avoid it is to have a strong and Why is it important to you to write a memoir?

Why is it important to you to speak to thes First of all, first that the Jewish people themselve realize what could possibly happ and that the only way is Israel.

And the other thing is that the non-Jewish people realize what this is.

And that we are no different to anyone else.

One thing I always say to people if you believe in God, you t And if there is only one God, then everybody's God is is the same And it doesn't matter what you call Him or what your your way of religion is.

And of course, this also means that they have to be tolerant of other people as well, not just Jews.

what do you think about God?

I don't believe that God is going to fish everybody out and put them somewhere else or save their lives or All the horrible things that happen even now, where is God?

You know?

So I don't believe in a actual I think that the God is in us.

And that we are the gods that can That's it.

it doesn't matter who you are, what you are, what color you are, what you how different you are from one another.

We are all made from the same universe.

And that's it.

Thank you, sir.