BORRANDO HUELLAS: las autoridades belgas están destruyendo archivos del Holocausto, en concreto de la persecución de los judíos en Bélgica durante los años 30 y 40. Bélgica fue el único país en el que el propio gobierno participó en las deportaciones a los campos de concentración y exterminio. Un poco de historia:

In January 1940 the Belgian King Leopold III, the father of the present King Albert II and an outspoken anti-Semite, told the Belgian government: “The number of Israelites that have entered the country illegally since September 1939 is estimated to be 30,000. Action against them cannot be harsh enough.”

When German troops invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, the Belgian authorities rounded up thousands of “unpatriotic” Belgians and foreigners, often entire families. Their exact number is unknown, as the records have been been destroyed. In Antwerp alone, however, 3,000 suspects were arrested. The majority of them were Jews; about 400 were (non-Jewish) German citizens and 20 were Flemish-Nationalists. Citizens from allied and neutral countries were arrested as well.

The prisoners were stowed in railway wagons and deported to France. One victim later recalled: “It took our train seven days to get from Brussels to Orléans. Under a torrid heat, locked up with 40 people, including women and children, in a hermetically sealed wagon where we had to stay day and night, we suffered from hunger, a lack of air and especially from thirst. We were left for 43 hours without receiving even a drop of water. [...] Many people died en route.” The exact number of the victims is unknown.

Most records relating to the “phantom trains” have disappeared, but one case, involving 79 prisoners, is well-known because it included a prominent Flemish politician, Joris van Severen, the leader of a fervently pro-Belgian Fascist party. The group was made up of 21 Belgians (including an agent of the British Intelligence Service) and 58 non-Belgians: 19 Jews, 15 non-Jewish Germans, 9 Italians (including at least 4 Communist opponents of Mussolini), 6 Dutchmen (including an 18-year-old girl with her mother and grandmother), 3 Luxemburgians, 2 citizens of neutral Switzerland, a Spaniard, a Dane, a Frenchman and an English-speaking Canadian. French soldiers gone berserk massacred 21 of them at the French town of Abbeville. The victims included the Canadian, the Dutch grandmother, a German Catholic monk, a Hungarian Jew, a Czech Jew, a Communist Brussels town councillor and Joris van Severen and his deputy.

Thousands of civilians deported by the Belgians on the “phantom trains” were released by the Wehrmacht, the German army, after the surrender of France. Their number included many Jews. They were the only Jews ever liberated by Hitler’s army. The Wehrmacht allowed them to return to Belgium. However, 3,537 Jews holding German and Austrian passports were kept imprisoned. This group later ended up in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. They were the only Auschwitz victims who had been arrested at the order of a Western goverment. Leo Frenssen, an Antwerp Flemish-Nationalist and pacifist member of the Belgian Parliament, who had also been imprisoned in the South of France, tried in vain to get his Jewish co-prisoners released.