The following is a synopsis of Jacques Weisser’s book which recounts his life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Jacques Weisser was born on 7 February 1942 in Antwerp, Belgium, too young to remember what happened to him during the war. For most of his life, Jacques simply believed what he was told, that he was hidden during the war by a Catholic lady in the hills and forests of the Ardennes in south-east Belgium. He knew his mother Martha and younger sister Lea hadn’t survived the war and that his father had been sent to various concentration camps including Auschwitz and yet managed to survive.
It was only in 2017, thanks to the research of Reinier Heinsman, a 25 year-old law student and author from the Netherlands, that Jacques discovered he had been hidden with a group of other children in orphanages and hospitals to evade capture by the Germans. The Germans did however uncover the children and Jacques’ life, and the lives of the other children, were miraculously saved by an edict, which applied only to Belgium, that children under the age of five without parents would not be sent to the gas chambers. He also learned more details about his mother’s death – that she had been deported on 12 September to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers.
After the war, Jacques and his father were reunited and Jacques spent his teenage years and 20s on the move, living in London, Southern Rhodesia and Israel before meeting his wife Judy and settling in London. They went on to have one daughter, Corinne, and two wonderful grandsons.
A former Executive Director of AJEX and now Trustee of Yad Vashem UK, Jacques has spent many years discovering the hidden pieces of his past and has even reunited with some of the other hidden children in Belgium, most notably Bill Frankenstein. He received a BEM in 2017 and is a fierce Holocaust educator and believes that all stories of Holocaust survivors should never be forgotten.
