(2024-04-28/30) This is the first stage of a journey into the past, following in the footsteps of my great-great-grandfather Abraham Fleischer, born in 1800 in Tarnobrzeg. This is in Polish Subcarpathia and you can already guess what "East" stands for in the motto of the trip. Abraham was a butcher (in German: Fleischer) by trade, what else! His 500 or so descendants are scattered all over the world, most of whom now live in the USA, Great Britain and in France. Whom do we meet in Antwerp? Abraham's grandson Salomon and his children arrived just before the start of the First World War and settled in the Jewish Quarter, where else would they have!
They moved to Great Britain in the 1930s, just in time to escape the Holocaust and Second World War. Not so my uncle Maximilian Hauster, a great-grandson of Abraham. He was arrested in Brussels in 1942, spent almost a year and a half in the Fort Breendonk Concentration Camp before being deported via the SS Transit Camp Mechelen to Auschwitz on 14.01.1943 and murdered there.
Fort Breendonk can be reached by motorcycle, but Antwerp is best explored by bike, for example deep under the Scheldt, through the heritage-protected Sint-Anna Tunnel.
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