(Author: Omi Morgenstern Leissner, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025)
I have hurled myself into something I have been meaning to do for years – a wad of papers that answers to name of “Granny’s and Grandpa’s.” They come in a cone, the kind of “roll ’em up and shove” shape one might sculpt things into when not quite sure if and when you’ll ever need them again. The pages require careful peeling off. Some are worn through at the bends and have long since lost their edge. My fingertips will become black to the touch. I take a breath and begin.
I emerge a few days later, without having fully understood everything but unquestionably shaken. What touches me most deeply are the numerous documents I find pertaining to visa requests. From what I can make out, all of them, without exception, even those in foreign languages, say the same thing: Please get me and my family out of here!
The requests are hand-written in a beautiful script on fine, lined sheets of paper with a fading pen. So pale are some that my sister thinks we might be looking at carbon copies of the originals, though official-looking scrawls and stamps seem to imply otherwise. Under these circumstances, I am relieved every time I reach a brief, typed up document, only to be overcome, first with the rise, then with the steep fall of my grandparents’ hopes – “visa nao possivel.”
Clearly, their main efforts were focused on the United States. Secondarily they tried Brazil. Maybe there are others in there that I fail to understand. All we knew growing up was that my grandfather had succeeded in obtaining a visa as a diamond-cutter to Lourenco Marques, now Maputo, Mozambique.
My father, Jacques Morgenstern, didn’t like to talk about his family’s flight through war-torn Europe. We knew he had been born in Poland and that his family – parents Leibish and Witta, elder sister Anne and himself – had moved to Antwerp when he was but a baby. The primary motivating factor behind that move appears to have been to make a living. My grandfather began working as a diamond merchant, a common profession for Jewish men. One Friday – it was the second week of May 1940 – he failed to reach the bank in time to deposit some “stones” he had in his possession. That weekend, the bombing began and was soon, unbearable. My grandfather decided they were to take the next train to France.
Our father, so he told us, was furious. He was a headstrong teenager, adamant that what they needed to do was “stay put” along with the other Jews, who were waiting at least until Monday for the banks to open in order to withdraw money for the inevitable journey. My grandfather stood firm. He took his family, a few essentials and his little parcel of stones and somehow managed to cram them all, first, onto the coach to Brussels and then, onto the one bound for Paris. When it was subsequently learned that the train they had caught was the last to leave unoccupied Belgium, my father never got over the guilt – “What would have happened to us had I gotten my way!”
What did we know about the journey? That the train was diverted from Paris and had wound its way through the south of France; that there were soldiers everywhere; that my grandfather had put on tefillin in their cabin (my father was frozen with fear); and that my aunt had become very ill and that my grandmother had wept and begged the officials not to take her off the train, until they relented.
We learned that my aunt eventually received treatment in a little village named Ravel, the first in a line of eventful stopovers. After that came Toulouse, Marseille, Perpignan — at the foot of the snowy Pyrenees, and on the other side — Barcelona and Madrid. Finally they reached Lisbon, “Bottleneck of Europe in World War II,” where they remained for some months, until setting sail for Mozambique, a Portuguese colony at the time.
We were also aware that at some stage, a 16-year-old Jewish youth, a neighbor from Antwerp, had joined the quest. The boy was completely worn out when my father’s family found him and persuaded him to stay. He appears to have lived in their home for some time, and the two youngsters must have become something of brothers. Certainly, my father spoke of him as a friend, though this was already years later, and the memory had long since gone fuzzy.
We understood that in the end the youth had chosen not to accompany my father’s family on their trans-oceanic voyage and risk “isolating himself in a jungle in Africa.” Instead, in the wake of apparently, joyful news that his parents were back in Antwerp, he aimed to “go back” and find them. More than that, nobody knew. But always, I wondered what had happened to him.
After that, I look up other streets and numbers. I find a brick-faced block in Antwerp; a road in Ravel; another pretty building in Lisbon, this time in pink; and a grand apartment block on Piotrkowska Avenue in Lodz. This must have been the home where my grandparents began their married life. Wikipedia proudly presents me with various pictures of it over the years. I try to imagine what it was like for Jews. Mostly, I look closely at the names. I am fascinated at how they change from document to document. Sometimes they are written in Jewish accents, sometimes in French. I read them carefully and find the ones I am familiar with — Leibish, Witta, Hanna and Jacques — and then one more — Abram. For the first time, I hold the possibility of the “adopted” boy’s identity in my grasp.
I spend hours on the internet. I try different versions of the name in various combinations. Sometimes, my own (infuriating) spelling mistakes lead me off track. Sometimes, they are a stroke of luck. Either way, I finally find it, an obituary, a few years old by now, but the description of the early biography seems to fit. The young man’s name, I learn, was Bram (Abraham) Fishler.
I recover the names of Abram’s children. There are five of them, four boys and a girl. I locate some contact details. They are spread between Belgium and the U.S. Now what? I write them, in the way of “Dear madam/sir. There might have been a connection between our fathers during the War. Please be in touch. Regards.”
I wait impatiently for replies. In our instant world, hours feel like days. Months. Finally, they begin to appear on the screen, cautiously at first, then spilling with emotions, like me and my sisters, all taken up in this unexpected brush with some terrifying untold past. Something of a story begins to unfold:
Dear Omi, our late father did not talk much about those times, it was certainly too
painful, so we really know very little. From what I remember, he did mention
something about a family who took him along on the run, and the name does
seem to ring a bell. I also do remember him saying that some families had
ended up in South Africa, so it could very well have been your father’s family.
I remember him telling us that he actually left Antwerp of his own will. He
had wanted to get away for a few days, being tired and annoyed at having to
go to cheder so often, as he used to say. He met his sister on the way to the
railway station, and asked her to tell their parents not to worry, that he would
be back before shabbes. The Germans invaded Holland while he was
traveling, and that clearly changed his plans.
It seems that while in Lisbon, our dad received a free pass from the German
authorities, allowing him to return to Antwerp to be reunited with his family.
It was in fact his mother’s efforts to get her son back that resulted in its being
issued. When my father was informed that such a pass was issued, he
immediately saw it was a trap, so rather than go back, decided to
continue his trip.
Not being able to receive a visa to the States, my father was able, with the help
of an Antwerp man in Lisbon, to receive a visa for Cuba, where he ended up
meeting my mother, who was also on the run from Belgium. After the War, he
finally made his way to New York to try to see if any of his family had
survived. Nobody had. He never got over the guilt.
He lost his entire family in Auschwitz.
Where do you live now?
Us? I write back. We are six daughters. We were born and grew up in South Africa. Today we all live in or around Jerusalem. I am proud to write that. I am also suddenly struck by the arbitrary, the fragile, the whimsical, the tenuous nature of my own identity.
I am frightened by the way in which my very existence owes itself to a little parcel of stones; the outcome of a quarrel over a jam-packed train; and the “yay” or “nay” clumsily typed up by some anonymous clerk with a fancy stamp. More so, I am in awe at the foresight and strength that drove the actions and decisions of two people, exactly my age at the writing.
They stand before me now, stripped of the grandparent images they took on in the various family portraits in which I came to recognize them. I examine for hours the photos attached to the various certificates. My grandfather is unshaven and wan. My grandmother ekes out a strained smile for the camera. My aunt is beautiful. My father looks sixteen. It is the oldest picture of him we have.
The family eventually arrived in Lourenco Marques and some months later, they were able to obtain a much sought-after permit to enter South Africa. When they arrived in Johannesburg, my father was amazed to find it was not a jungle after all but a bustling modern city, with skyscrapers far taller than the buildings he had grown up about in
Belgium.
He flung himself into his studies, attaining within two years a school-leaving certificate that sported the highest number of “distinctions” the district had ever seen. He went on to study architecture, at which he excelled, and was soon appointed as full-time university lecturer. It was there that he met my mother. They married, set up a co-practice and built a beautiful home for their growing family.
My aunt completed her social work studies and channeled her survivor’s guilt into a working trip to a D.P. camp at Bergen Belzen, immediately after the War. She eventually married and settled in South Africa, where she continued to carry out acts of chesed and was outspoken in her renunciation of apartheid.
My grandparents bought an apartment in the center of town in a building with a European façade and the presumptuous name of Buckingham Court. They tried to make a life for themselves, though I don’t imagine they ever felt quite at home. Grandpa Leibish made frequent trips to the Holy Land, where he meted out aid to the
trickle of cousins that remined from his once-huge family. He was deeply mourned when he died, at the age of sixty-six. His body was flown to Israel, to its final resting place in Jerusalem.
After that, Granny Witta went to live in Israel and my father took over the diamond business that was left behind. In that way, his life took on contours strikingly similar to those of the sixteen-year-old ‘Bram, himself the son of a Polish-Jewish family that had moved to Antwerp, where his father had found work as a diamond merchant. After the War, ‘Bram returned to Antwerp, where, along with two orphaned cousins, he began a diamond business. It grew into one of the largest family-owned diamond companies, as diamond companies tend to be when Jewish men have sons.
It is hard to believe the two diamond men never met up in later life, even by chance. Indeed, my initial realization that such a meeting would never take place – ‘Bram died in 2003, my father, in 2013 – met with great regret and frustration. I berated myself for not having probed those documents earlier.
But now that I know a little more about what happened, I wonder if it was a blessing. One can only begin to imagine the pain such a reunion would have meant for them, both for the boy who had lost his closest family in the deluge, and for the one who was lucky enough to get away with them. It might have been too much for either of them to bear.
So I believe I am pleased that this stone was well-browned before being turned over. And I am reminded of what my father would say whenever he saw me get upset over something, “Life is full of surprises, my cookie, that’s what gives us the drive to keep on living. You never know how things will turn out in the end.”
- Dr Naomi Leissner is an independent researcher based in Jerusalem. This article is based on her presentation ‘Alsedziai and Beyond’ given in February 2025 to the membership, staff and guides of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre.
