As soon as they enter, the visitor feels reassured by the soft calm reigning in the offices of Arthur Langerman, one of the last sacred monsters of these Antwerp diamond dealers who have nourished so many legends. Tall, jeans and a good-cut polo shirt, rimmed glasses revealing surprisingly blue eyes – one eye charms, the other evaluates –, a shaved head, the man welcomes in a soft, slightly hissing voice.
In the room, the eye is drawn to the huge photo of twenty sparkling diamonds. Blues, pinks, yellows, greens. Tribute to these stones that made the fortune of the master of the house, one of the first to bet on colored diamonds at a time when everyone swore only by white stones.
Sudden change of atmosphere on the opposite wall, where are plastered about twenty yellow stars, of those carried by the Jews during the second world war. “I need to see them. They are part of my life.”, explains the diamond dealer. They belong to the incredible collection of nearly 10,000 posters, sketches, newspapers, postcards, paintings, cutlery, vases, which he has tracked down, flushed out and bought for sixty years and which have for only common point their rabid anti-Semitism. Since November 8, a selection of this strange compilation has been visible in the Brussels premises of the European Commission. “That one was my mother’s!” »now says Arthur Langerman, pointing to a particularly smudged star.
Seventy-seven years earlier and 1,200 kilometers further east: Auschwitz. Cécile Langerman is one of a group of a hundred women, exhausted by a three-day journey in cattle cars, who wait in the rain, guarded by the SS and their police dogs. Night is approaching when they meet the group of men rounded up at the same time as them in Antwerp. Cécile Langerman barely has time to recognize her husband, Salomon, who slips her what she thinks is, to the touch, a piece of bread. ” For the little one “, he whispers. The little one is Arthur, their child born two years earlier. Salomon does not know that the Germans separated him from his mother before the departure of the funeral convoys. A survivor of the concentration camps, Cécile Langerman will never see her husband again, and ” the little ” will not know his father.
In 1962, Arthur Langerman, barely 20 years old, was rummaging through the bins of a postcard merchant at the Brussels flea market, when he came across a card “humorous” from the 1930s showing a Jew reading the Bible while sodomizing a child. On the back of the card, a few words in German: “We are having a good holiday. Good kisses to you all. » The young man who followed, hour by hour, the trial of the executioner of Auschwitz Adolf Eichmann, which has just ended in Jerusalem, has a flash: is it not there, in this simple postcard, this “trivialization of evil” Hannah Arendt was talking about during the trial?
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