Jewish Volunteers

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Jewish Volunteers

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  • Jewish Volunteers of Antwerp and Brussels
    A group of Jewish volunteers of Antwerp and Brussels, most of them Polish and Hungarian, photographed in a studio in Murcia in 1937. They were part of the 13th Dabrowski Brigade, and some of them were later assigned to the newly established Jewish Botwin Company. Seated at the bottom, second from the left, is Captain Meier 'Maks' Stark, and next to him is Captain Alter Szerman. Standing in the second row, second from the left, is Emanuel 'Mundek' Mink. Like Szerman, he was one of the commanders of the Botwin Company. In the second row, third from the left, we recognize Joël Lubka, the older brother of Lea Lubka, who died in Spain. This Lea worked as a courier for resistance fighter Bert Van Hoorick during the occupation and died in a concentration camp. She was later featured in a beautiful piece of prose by Louis Paul Boon, My Little War ("Lea Lubka Returns").
  • Sapir
    At the bottom left, wearing a cap, we recognize Mowsza 'Micha' Sapir, who graduated in 1933 as an electronics engineer at Ghent University. He was the third commander of the Botwin Company and was killed in April 1938.
  • Cie Botwin
    The Botwin Company in 1938. At the bottom, holding the company's magazine, is Alter Szerman.
  • Alter Szerman at the Murcia clinic
    Group photo taken in front of the Murcia clinic in 1937. Fourth from the left is Alter Szerman, with his future wife Adela Korn standing to his right. Second from the left is Srulek Livschitz from Bessarabian Kichineff (now Chișinău in Moldova), a garment worker from Elsene/Ixelles. Livschitz led the Bessarabian partisan group of the Mobile Corps in Brussels in 1942. He was arrested in March 1944 along with his girlfriend, Gitla Kinzclewska, and died in Mauthausen in May 1945. In this photo, Kinzclewska stands to his right. She was repatriated to Belgium in 1945.
  • At the beach in Benacassim
    A rare moment of relaxation in 1937 on the beach of the Brigades’ recovery center in Benicassim, north of Valencia. First on the right is Maks Stark, and next to him is his wife, Genia Gross. Lying at the bottom left is Adela Korn, with her sister Anna standing above her. Anna’s husband, Alter Szerman, is lying in the sand, third from the left. Stark was killed in the Battle of Teruel in January 1938. All of them lived in Antwerp.
  • At the concentration camp in Gurs
    A unique photo taken in 1939 in the Gurs concentration camp in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. In this group of Jewish Brigadists of Belgium, we recognize Mundek Mink at the top left and Alter Szerman as the second from the right at the top. After the dissolution of the Brigades in October 1938, they were unable to return to Belgium and were later deported by the French Vichy regime to Djelfa in the Algerian desert. This "punishment" ultimately saved them from deportation to Auschwitz, as they were liberated there by the Allies in 1943.