In the summer of 1942, the local police assisted the Nazi forces as they rounded up Jews in raids across Antwerp. These Jews were deported and the vast majority died in Hitler’s death camps. It is still a hugely sensitive and inflammatory subject which few in Belgium dare to talk about. The grim episode is the subject of The Last Jewish Summer, a feature documentary which Thom M. Vander Beken presented as a work-in-progress at CONNEXT 2023.
The documentary’s synopsis reads how, in the summer of 1942, the Antwerp police helped the German occupiers to arrest the Jews of the city during several nightly raids. More than 10,000 Antwerp Jews were deported and, after the war, only 500 would return alive.
Eighty years later, a group of sixth-year pupils from a diverse, multiethnic school in Antwerp discover the painful truth about what happened to the Jews of their school. They meet relatives of some of the Jewish families that were arrested, but they also meet relatives of the police officers who were responsible for those arrests.
The Last Jewish Summer is produced by Marc Goyens for Quetzalcoatl and has received production funding by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF). Editing commenced on the documentary four weeks before the CONNEXT presentation.
Local culpability was displayed “either by actively participating with the Germans or by remaining silent and looking the other way,” Vander Beken told the CONNEXT audience of thein Antwerp. “And my film is about that silence…but it’s also the silence that is still there today. Even 80 years after the end of the war, many in Flanders still find it difficult to fully acknowledge the tragedy that occurred.”
The director has spent four years researching the film and has found four Jewish protagonists who tell the stories of their families. Another protagonist is Ben, whose grandfather was a local police officer and who finds it difficult to admit that his forebear seemingly “had no other choice.”
“Right from the start. however, it was my intention to include the younger generation in this story and through my research I found an event that made this possible,” Vander Beken further explained about how his project has evolved. “In January, 1942, the German occupier decided that all Jewish pupils over the age of 16 had to leave the public schools…In one particular school, the Royal Atheneum, 20 pupils were expelled. And to connect the past to the present, I went back to that specific school, and together with the teachers and the headmaster, we set up a trajectory of three years [duration] where our goal was to prepare some of the sixth graders to participate in my film.”
Van der Beken spoke to BDE’s Geoffrey Macnab in 2022 about his strong interest in the subject and the sense of urgency he feels to make this documentary. “We all really grow up here in families who don’t really talk about what happened in the past, especially not in the war,” he explained. “I was triggered and I started to look for people to interview. As you can imagine, everybody told me it would probably be very difficult to find Jewish families who would want to talk about this traumatic chapter in their history.”
As it turned out, finding Jewish families willing to speak on camera was “the easy part.” Much tougher was tracking down Flemish people whose relatives had been involved in the arrests and deportations who were ready to give interviews. Most preferred to keep silent.
“It’s a big taboo still. When people said they were willing to talk to me, I very quickly noticed that people didn’t really seem to understand how bad things were back then.”
The director has thought hard about this reticence regarding the shameful incidents in wartime Antwerp. “I think it’s because [although] we watch films about the war and films about the Holocaust, we always get a romanticised image of that. You don’t really grasp the horror and the pain that went on. For people, it’s just something from the past – they [the Jews] were arrested, they were deported and they never came back.”
One especially poignant image which the filmmakers have found is of a young Belgian-Jewish couple on their wedding day. “It was the last Jewish wedding in June 1942,” the director explained. “This image just captures perfectly what it is all about, ordinary people like you and I who basically wanted to do the normal things in their lives but who were isolated, vilified and then arrested and deported. There is nothing more joyful than your wedding day but to see a wedding dress with a yellow star makes it very visually clear how bad the situation was.”
Amazingly, the couple, Malvina Löwenwirth and Kopel Brandstätter, both survived the war. The director was able to meet and interview Malvina who died only last year, well into her 90s.
Van der Beken underlines that core to the work will be the involvement and reaction of the contemporary school kids. “The presence of the pupils in the film force us to look differently at our own history, but they also force us to take a closer look at our diverse and complex society of today, where some of the structures and mechanisms that were around in the thirties and the forties are still there and getting stronger. And the stories in my film remind us why it is important to remember.”
