BRUSSELS – Simon Gronovsky has done many deeds of bravery and generosity in his 89 years of life, and opening a window in April is not usually considered among them, but this April was not uncommon.
It was the height of the first wave of the coronavirus epidemic, which struck Belgium hard anywhere in the world. But as a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Gronowski had previously faced more death intimacy.
The obscure lawyer called out his courage, moved the electric piano under the window sill and fluttered the window open, basking in the spring sun with a thick, careful calm of the city frightened by the virus. And he started jazz tune ka.
“I was scared,” he said. “It’s not normal to just play with the window open.”
But soon, her neighbors peeked out of their windows, donating some masks and going to her house to listen better.
Someone took a black-and-white picture of him playing, printed it out, and later slipped it into his mailbox, writing, simply, “Mercy.”
He started playing regularly, filling the leafy streets with jazz notes and relieving his beleaguered neighbors that lasted until the end of May.
Amy Edwards Anderson, an English teacher in the United States who has lived in Brussels for 22 years, first heard Mr. Gronowski play while sitting in her back yard with her husband and three children. She was surprised, he said, as it quickly became clear that this was no piano practice. He was somehow performing for that block.
Short-window concerts flooded his family’s bonds and took them upstairs.
“There was someone here who was expanding the music to share with the neighbors, for no reason other than to make people feel good in difficult times.” “A kind of unwanted gift in the neighborhood.”
Mr. Gronowski aimed at endless celebrations to make people happy, but playing for others was also an intrinsic value for his entire life.
“Music is a means of communication, a means of connection,” he said in his home office fee recently afternoon, surrounded by a throat of documents.
Mr. Gronowski taught himself how to play the piano as a teenager, because he too, along with his older sister Eta, was the first, most important, communicator, to perish, in 1943, at the age of 19.
“I told him lovingly,” he said. “She was a brilliant pianist.”
Mr. Gronowski’s first act of bravery took place many months before April, when a very different kind of disaster was unfolding in Europe.
On April 19, 1943, when he was 11, Mr. Gronowski jumped out of a speeding train.
He and his mother, along with dozens of others, were put in the car of Mecor, which was heading from the Jewish town of Machiavelli to Machiavelli on the deadly road to Schwitz.
Of all the trains of destruction, Mr. Gronowski is particularly bound up in Holocaust history. Known as “Conway 20”, it was blocked by three resistance fighters shortly after Machelin’s departure. Dozens of agitated people had the opportunity to flee to Flanders ’farms.
Soon the train began to accelerate again, Mr. Gronowski’s mother, perhaps excited by the incident and a glimmer of hope, urged him to bounce.
“I jumped because I listened to my mother’s orders,” Mr. Gronowski said. He jumped for his life. His mother did not follow.
“If I had known he wasn’t going to jump, I’d have stayed in the train,” he said, his cheeks resting in the palm of his hand as if his head were suddenly too heavy.
For the next 17 months the boy hid in the attics of some Catholic families. After the liberation of Brussels in September 1944, he was reunited with his sick father, who had been hospitalized and out for years, and finally, with a broken heart, Mr Gronowski believes – left the boy orphaned the following year.
Mr. Gronowski recalls memories of the long-term limitations, fears, and desperate sadness of the 1940s, in a newspaper column he wrote in late March as an incentive for fellow Belgians as they struggled to settle in a lockdown.
He wrote, “Currently due to forced laziness, the reflection is favorable, my thinking is distorted and the bonds I suffered 75 years ago from 1942 to 1944, when I was 10-12 years old, are reunited.
“Today we can be with our family or help through it, stay in touch, we can do our shopping, stock up on provisions, read newspapers, watch television, but then we We live in terror, we had everything, we were cold, hungry and our families were isolated, disorganized, ”he added.
The robbery at the exhibition today was already burning inside the boy who had lost everything by the end of World War II.
After spending three years in foster care, he simply returned to the family home and entered lodgers to raise funds for his life and school.
By the time Mr. Gronowski turned 23, he had earned a Ph.D. In law. He became a lawyer, married Mary-Claire Hubrechs, they had two daughters, Katia and Isabel. And for six decades he said little about his dead parents, his beloved sister Eta, or that day he jumped off a moving train on the way to Schwitz.
“It was no secret, but I didn’t talk about it,” he said, his cheerful mood becoming ephemeral. “Why? Because I felt guilty. Why are they dead, and I am alive? ”
In 2002, that all changed, when he was pushed by friends who knew his story, he decided to make a decision in the past.
“I need to take witnesses and write a story, so I wrote my first book,” another act of bravery, which gave Mr. Gronowski a high profile for advancing the unpredictable new life and progressive goals of media representation.
After “L’Fiant du XX Convoi” (“Child the F 20th Convoy ”was published and Mr. Gronowski’s story became widely known in Belgium and beyond, and he began lecturing, especially in schools.
“It was very painful to shake it all up again,” he said. “But now I feel like I’m bringing something positive to young people, and it makes me happy, I’m free.”
His new fresh fame led him to another bravery and generosity.
A student who heard him speak at a Belgian school in 2012 called him immediately with a wonderful proposal.
Koenrad Tinel, a Belgian artist of Mr. Gronowski’s age, wrote about the crime of being born into a Nazi family. His brother was guarding at Mechelen camp where Mr. Gronowski and his mother were kept with him in the caravan 20. Wood was placed before Mr. Gronowski was placed on the meet?
At the time, the two men, in their 80s, met in the humble offices of the Belgian Union of Progressive Jews.
Mr Gronowski said: “This is how our friendship was born. “And now that Koenrad is more than a friend, he’s a brother.”
The two wrote a book, “Finally, Salvation,” and gave lectures together.
When Big Tinal’s brother, the camp guard, Walter was on his death bed, he asked to meet Mr. Gronowski and apologized.
“I took him in my arms and I forgave him,” he said. “This forgiveness was a relief to her, but it was a great relief to me.”
As Belgium battles another coronavirus wave with a second lockdown, Mr. Gronowski is currently playing his piano with Windows Shut (“It’s a little cool now”) and building future adventures. “I want to play with this band from New Reliance,” he said, fed up with childish enthusiasm. “They’re called Tuba Skinny, they’re great!”
Most of his school lectures have been suspended due to the epidemic, but they will resume soon, he says, and he will look forward to the same.
“When I tell my story in schools, I always end with a message of hope, I always tell them one important thing: I tell them that life is beautiful,” he said. “But it’s also a daily struggle.”
Monica Pronkzuk contributed to the report.
