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"We heard about the camps from the BBC but so many Jews seemed to think it couldn't happen to them. You know, it could happen again. Jews have to be ready to fight." -- Helene Moszkiewiez
At 19, Helene Moszkiewiez was a superb liar and an excellent tease.
For six harrowing years she survived by her wits, infiltrating the Brussels Gestapo headquarters where she posed as a secretary (she could not write a letter in German), collecting information for the Belgian Resistance. While residing in West Vancouver under a different name, having married her second husband and moved to Canada after the war, Moszkiewiez co-wrote her memoirs, Inside the Gestapo: A Jewish Woman's Secret War (Macmillan, 1985), with former Province editor turned Book Page editor Geoffrey Molyneux. Whereas the 2006 feature film Zwartboek [aka Black Book] directed by Paul Verhoeven can only be loosely described as a Dutch variant of her story, the earlier TV movie in 1991, A Woman at War, starring Martha Plimpton, is intended to directly portray the real characters in Belgium.
The story of how Helene Moszkiewiez maintained three identities (Jewish, Belgian and German) while working with Franz Boehler, a brave mastermind, reads like a thriller by merely relaying the details. She was married to her first husband (both named Albert) for just one week before he was detained and later murdered at Auschwitz. Her parents were sent to the concentration camps in 1943. Helen used her multi-lingual charms for revenge.
The Germans took control of Belgium when she was 19. Two years earlier she had met a handsome young Belgian soldier named Francois in a Brussels library. When she met Francois again, he was operating as Franz while wearing a German uniform. After two successful, life-saving missions, Franz asked her to help him daringly infiltrate the Gestapo with falsified identity papers, posing as Olga Richer. He suggested she could gradually get to know two Gestapos chiefs, Mueller and Schwenke, who met regularly at the Cafe Louise. Over weeks or months, Helene/Olga was expected to somehow inveigle a job for Franz, her supposed fiance, inside Gestapo headquarters. She accomplished this on her first visit to Cafe Louise.
"They were so stupid," she told Geoffrey Molyneux in 1985. "They thought only in caricatures. You know, the Jewish man with a long black beard and a large hooked nose. Many of the Gestapo were the dregs. They were just there because they were cruel. The Abwehr intelligence men, now they were bright and you had to be careful when they were around."
Next, after Franz had secured a high-level intelligence position within the non-descript Gestapo headquarters at 453 Louise Avenue, she obtained her own security clearance to work for him, posing as his secretary, after first necessarily rejecting an offer to work for the top-ranked Mueller. All the arrogant and contemptible Gestapo chiefs hoped and expected to seduce her but she maintained the facade of betrothal to Franz. For most of the war she lived under an assumed name at 46 Leon de Lantsheere Street.
Moszkiewiez's harrowing story recalls hearing screams of SS victims, stealing information to rescue Jews scheduled for transport, helping a truckload of POWs escape by driving them to the Swiss border and killing a senior Gestapo officer in cold blood in a public park. She declined an invitation to work for British intelligence after the war and received a Certificate of Service, signed by Field Marshall Montgomery, in 1946, made out to Mademoiselle Helene Moszkiewiez. Perhaps not surprisingly, since she excelled at being secretive, there is precious little information to be found about her on the internet where her name has been misspelled (as Moszkiewicz) by Amazon, and therefore its endemically incorrect. Born on December 20, 1920, she died on June 18, 1998.
In the year that her memoir was published, Moszkiewicz incurred the wrath of the Jewish community by expressing her feelings in a Vancouver Sun article by Joanne Blaine, entitled How one Jew fought the Nazis (Nov. 1, 1985), about "how meekly most of her fellow Jews went along with the German invaders ... allowing themselves to be taken away to concentration camps without a fight ... like sheep waiting to be slaughtered."
Bronia Sonnenschein issued a firm and important rebuttal in the Jewish Western Bulletin, well worth quoting in full. "Mrs. Moszkiewicz has tarnished the memory of every man, woman and child who was killed during the Holocaust and cannot defend himself against her accusations of being meek or acting like sheep. She has opened up the wounds of those who survived the Holocaust -- by the grace of G-d -- and feel the anguish of being criticized by someone who had the opportunity through a chance encounter with a young Belgian soldier to be actively involved in working for the Underground.
"As Mrs. Moszkiewicz says, she herself was a 'naive' girl when she entered the Resistance. Once there, she would not have been able to leave, comparing the Resistance to a 'Mafia'. But even her heroic work does not give her the right to call those who were killed and tortured beyond belief meek or to compare them with sheep. Not all of us had guns or knives handy to attack the beast that tortured us.
"We were herded at gunpoint to the ghettos, the cattle-cars, the concentration camps. Would Mrs. Moszkiewicz regard Elie Wiesel as meek or a sheep? Does Simon Wiesenthal fit into this category? Would thousands upon thousands of courageous people deserve to be called meek for having worn the Star of David when all they had to fight back with were only their two hands? How does Moszkiewicz regard hostages? Are they also meek and behaving like sheep instead of fighting back their captors with their bare hands?
"I am a survivor. I had to endure Nazi atrocities from March 1938 when Hitler marched into Vienna til the day of our liberation on May 8, 1945 in Theresienstadt. I cannot take credit for having saved lives -- does that make me a meek person, acting like a sheep? Or does it make me a victim who was robbed of the dignity to defend herself by having been stripped of every possible defense action?
"We can't all be heroes. Mrs. Moszkiewicz must be aware of this as even her own parents perished at the hands of the Nazis.
"To be courageous also means to have compassion for the less courageous ones, the 'meek' ones of this world. The world does not consist of heroes only."
BOOKS:
Inside the Gestapo: A Jewish Woman's Secret War (Macmillan, 1985; UK: Bodley Head, 1986; Dell, 1987; Warner Books, 1992)
[BCBW 2006] "War" "Jewish" Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
At 19, Helene Moszkiewiez was a superb liar and an excellent tease.
For six harrowing years she survived by her wits, infiltrating the Brussels Gestapo headquarters where she posed as a secretary (she could not write a letter in German), collecting information for the Belgian Resistance. While residing in West Vancouver under a different name, having married her second husband and moved to Canada after the war, Moszkiewiez co-wrote her memoirs, Inside the Gestapo: A Jewish Woman's Secret War (Macmillan, 1985), with former Province editor turned Book Page editor Geoffrey Molyneux. Whereas the 2006 feature film Zwartboek [aka Black Book] directed by Paul Verhoeven can only be loosely described as a Dutch variant of her story, the earlier TV movie in 1991, A Woman at War, starring Martha Plimpton, is intended to directly portray the real characters in Belgium.
The story of how Helene Moszkiewiez maintained three identities (Jewish, Belgian and German) while working with Franz Boehler, a brave mastermind, reads like a thriller by merely relaying the details. She was married to her first husband (both named Albert) for just one week before he was detained and later murdered at Auschwitz. Her parents were sent to the concentration camps in 1943. Helen used her multi-lingual charms for revenge.
The Germans took control of Belgium when she was 19. Two years earlier she had met a handsome young Belgian soldier named Francois in a Brussels library. When she met Francois again, he was operating as Franz while wearing a German uniform. After two successful, life-saving missions, Franz asked her to help him daringly infiltrate the Gestapo with falsified identity papers, posing as Olga Richer. He suggested she could gradually get to know two Gestapos chiefs, Mueller and Schwenke, who met regularly at the Cafe Louise. Over weeks or months, Helene/Olga was expected to somehow inveigle a job for Franz, her supposed fiance, inside Gestapo headquarters. She accomplished this on her first visit to Cafe Louise.
"They were so stupid," she told Geoffrey Molyneux in 1985. "They thought only in caricatures. You know, the Jewish man with a long black beard and a large hooked nose. Many of the Gestapo were the dregs. They were just there because they were cruel. The Abwehr intelligence men, now they were bright and you had to be careful when they were around."
Next, after Franz had secured a high-level intelligence position within the non-descript Gestapo headquarters at 453 Louise Avenue, she obtained her own security clearance to work for him, posing as his secretary, after first necessarily rejecting an offer to work for the top-ranked Mueller. All the arrogant and contemptible Gestapo chiefs hoped and expected to seduce her but she maintained the facade of betrothal to Franz. For most of the war she lived under an assumed name at 46 Leon de Lantsheere Street.
Moszkiewiez's harrowing story recalls hearing screams of SS victims, stealing information to rescue Jews scheduled for transport, helping a truckload of POWs escape by driving them to the Swiss border and killing a senior Gestapo officer in cold blood in a public park. She declined an invitation to work for British intelligence after the war and received a Certificate of Service, signed by Field Marshall Montgomery, in 1946, made out to Mademoiselle Helene Moszkiewiez. Perhaps not surprisingly, since she excelled at being secretive, there is precious little information to be found about her on the internet where her name has been misspelled (as Moszkiewicz) by Amazon, and therefore its endemically incorrect. Born on December 20, 1920, she died on June 18, 1998.
In the year that her memoir was published, Moszkiewicz incurred the wrath of the Jewish community by expressing her feelings in a Vancouver Sun article by Joanne Blaine, entitled How one Jew fought the Nazis (Nov. 1, 1985), about "how meekly most of her fellow Jews went along with the German invaders ... allowing themselves to be taken away to concentration camps without a fight ... like sheep waiting to be slaughtered."
Bronia Sonnenschein issued a firm and important rebuttal in the Jewish Western Bulletin, well worth quoting in full. "Mrs. Moszkiewicz has tarnished the memory of every man, woman and child who was killed during the Holocaust and cannot defend himself against her accusations of being meek or acting like sheep. She has opened up the wounds of those who survived the Holocaust -- by the grace of G-d -- and feel the anguish of being criticized by someone who had the opportunity through a chance encounter with a young Belgian soldier to be actively involved in working for the Underground.
"As Mrs. Moszkiewicz says, she herself was a 'naive' girl when she entered the Resistance. Once there, she would not have been able to leave, comparing the Resistance to a 'Mafia'. But even her heroic work does not give her the right to call those who were killed and tortured beyond belief meek or to compare them with sheep. Not all of us had guns or knives handy to attack the beast that tortured us.
"We were herded at gunpoint to the ghettos, the cattle-cars, the concentration camps. Would Mrs. Moszkiewicz regard Elie Wiesel as meek or a sheep? Does Simon Wiesenthal fit into this category? Would thousands upon thousands of courageous people deserve to be called meek for having worn the Star of David when all they had to fight back with were only their two hands? How does Moszkiewicz regard hostages? Are they also meek and behaving like sheep instead of fighting back their captors with their bare hands?
"I am a survivor. I had to endure Nazi atrocities from March 1938 when Hitler marched into Vienna til the day of our liberation on May 8, 1945 in Theresienstadt. I cannot take credit for having saved lives -- does that make me a meek person, acting like a sheep? Or does it make me a victim who was robbed of the dignity to defend herself by having been stripped of every possible defense action?
"We can't all be heroes. Mrs. Moszkiewicz must be aware of this as even her own parents perished at the hands of the Nazis.
"To be courageous also means to have compassion for the less courageous ones, the 'meek' ones of this world. The world does not consist of heroes only."
BOOKS:
Inside the Gestapo: A Jewish Woman's Secret War (Macmillan, 1985; UK: Bodley Head, 1986; Dell, 1987; Warner Books, 1992)
[BCBW 2006] "War" "Jewish" Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
