Here is a song from my Girl Guide “chansonnier” (song book) with the title: “Let our voices unite before we part ways.” The third and last verse translates to:

Below a song from my Girl Guide “chansonnier” (song book) with the title: “Let our voices unite before we part ways.” The third and last verse translates to: And if I should meet death on my way Mowing down among us poor tramps Yes, I’ll be ready for my last journey I will say my very last adieu Chorus I wander in the world with joy in my heart And with my songs as baggage I am singing of love and I am singing of faith I am leaving for my ultimate voyage
Below a song from my Girl Guide “chansonnier” (song book) with the title: “Let our voices unite before we part ways.” The third and last verse translates to:
And if I should meet death on my way
Mowing down among us poor tramps
Yes, I’ll be ready for my last journey
I will say my very last adieu
Chorus
I wander in the world with joy in my heart
And with my songs as baggage
I am singing of love and I am singing of faith
I am leaving for my ultimate voyage

And if I should meet death on my way

 Mowing down among us poor tramps

Yes, I’ll be ready for my last journey

I will say my very last adieu

 Chorus

 I wander in the world with joy in my heart

And with my songs as baggage

I am singing of love and I am singing of faith

I am leaving for my ultimate voyage

 

My Thanks

I have lived sixty years with my husband Manfred. In all those years his strong support of any of my endeavors has never failed. For this third edition he did more than just wash a lot of dishes while I sat in front of the computer.

My thanks go to our computer and Microsoft Word. While I am only familiar with some features, altogether it was helpful to see green or red under lining for spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors.

For this edition, I found a proofreader and part editor par excellence in Joshua. I never thought that my grandchildren would turn out so helpful in many ways. Many thanks to Joshua and Evan and the other family members who helped me! Our granddaughter Mira was the first reader of the complete text of my stories. She gave me thumbs up which encouraged me to persist in working on the production of this book. In many respects this book became a family project with most family members making a contribution to it. Also nobody else who read the second edition discouraged me from proceeding, so here is the 3rd edition.

Mostly my gratitude goes to my parents who are no longer with us. They had the fortitude to find hiding places for me and for my brother, also for themselves. Thanks to that and a lot of luck we survived the Holocaust as the complete Birnbaum family after Liberation, a rare feat.

A word of thanks to my first cousins Evelyn Spiegler and David Weiser! They tore out many Birnbaum photographs from their parents’ photo albums, so that I could have them. As I mentioned elsewhere in this book, all our pictures stayed in our apartment in Leipzig which we had to abandon to the Nazis. I also slipped in a few pictures garnered from the Internet, as pertinent illustrations.

My counselors in the various hiding places were kind enough to provide me with photographs of myself to mail to my parents at a time when film was expensive and hard to find during the Nazi Occupation years.

Last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to the Belgian people. Many of them were directly involved in hiding me and other Jewish children at the risk of their own life. There were also many neighbors in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode and Cul-des-Sarts who knew that we were Jewish, but who did not denounce us to the Gestapo for a bounty. To all of them I owe my life.

Menlo Park, 2014

Bibliography

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Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes Historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Les Juifs de Belgique. De l’Immigration au Génocide, 1925-1945, 1994

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Kless, Shlomo. The Rescue of Jewish Children in Belgium during the Holocaust, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp275-   287, 1988, printed in Great- Britain

Kowalzik, Barbara. Wir waren Eure Nachbarn, Die Juden im Leipziger

Waldstrassenviertel, Pro Leipzig, 1996

Kreutner, S.J. Mein Leipzig 84 pages in German and Leipzig Sheli in Hebrew for the other half of the book with   photos in between. Rubin Mass          Ltd. Jerusalem 1982

Missika, Dominique. Le Chagrin des Innocents, Itinéraires d’enfants juifs de 1939-1947, Editions Grasse & Fasquelle, 1998

Spiegler, Evelyn, Editor. The Weiser Story, a History of a German-Jewish Family who lived through extraordinary times, Self-published 1995

Schreiber, Marion. The Twentieth Train, the true story of the ambush of the death train to Auschwitz, New York, NY undated

Steinberg, Maxime. Un pays occupé et ses juifs, Belgique entre France et Pays-Bas, Editions Quorum SPRL, 1998

Vromen, Suzanne. Hidden Children of the Holocaust, Oxford University Press 2008

Juden in Leipzig, Eine Dokumentation. Leipzig, 1989

Wildmann, Manfred und Erhard Roy Wiehn. Und flehentlich gesegnet, Briefe der Familie Wildmann aus Rivesaltes und Perpignan, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz, 1997

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