Robert H.

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I was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1938, which was neither the right time nor the right place to be born a Jew.

After Germany invaded Belgium in May, 1940, his parents escaped to France and made their way south to Marseilles in Vichy-controlled France.

Mr. Herschkowitz’s Aunt, Rosa Schnabel, stayed in Belgium but survived thanks to a Belgian named Pauline Joris-Brouwers. Mrs. Joris Brouwers allowed Mrs. Schnabel to hide in her house, and in 1997 Mr. Herschkowitz successfully petitioned for her to be declared “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.

As a child, I spent numerous summer days at her [Pauline Joris-Brouwers] place in Wommelgem or at our place in Antwerpen, playing with her children. I remember Pauline at my Bar Mitzvah when I told her how beautiful she looked with a new dress and a new hairdo.

Between October of 1940 and June of 1941, the Vichy government passed anti-Semitic legislation, the “Law of the Jews,” and at the end of 1941, the Vichy government arrested Robert's family and sent them to Rivesaltes, a French concentration camp. At the beginning of 1943, the family was separated.

Robert and his pregnant mother were sent to a “residence forcee” (forced domicile), a kind of house arrest in a small village. As a result, Robert's  brother was born in a German military hospital. Later, his father escaped from Rivesaltes, and was reunited with his family with help from the French resistance. The family crossed the Alps by foot in September of 1943 and found refuge in Switzerland until the end of the war.

Robert and his immediate family was fortunate. Deportation of foreign Jews to Nazi death camps began in March of 1942, and many Jews at Rivesaltes were deported to the French transit camp of Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz or the death camps of Sobibor or Majdanek. The Nazis murdered more than 77,000 Jews from France in these camps.

After the war, Robert received his BS in Engineering in Belgium and served in the Belgian Navy as an officer. Later he was detached to the navy of Zaire in Africa. He was recruited overseas by Boeing and came to Seattle in 1966. He received a MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington and a MA in Naval History and International Relations from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Robert has written numerous magazine articles and papers on naval armament, military history and naval operations. He has also served in the US Naval Reserve for 24 years and retired as a Commander.

For more than 25 years, I have also been teaching Jewish history at several Jewish schools. For the last 11 years I have been a volunteer as a crime analyst for the Bellevue Police Department. I am a member of the board of the Washington Holocaust Education and Resources Center and member of their speaker’s bureau.