The Word of Abusz Werber

"The Word of Abusz Werber" tells the extraordinary life story of Abusz Werber before, during and after the Second World War. Werber grew up in Poland and then moved to Belgium. During the Nazi occupation, he was the party leader of “Linke Poale Zion” (Left-wing Workers of Zion), a Zionist-Socialist party in Belgium, and one of the initiators of the Jewish Defense Committee of Belgium, which managed to save about 3,000 children and several thousand Jewish adults from the clutches of the Nazis. With his party comrades, Abusz Werber ensured the editing, publication and distribution of 28 issues of a secret (underground) clandestine newspaper in Yiddish, “Unzer Wort (Our Word)”, which appeared until the Liberation in September 1944 (and also legally afterwards). In this publication, he assiduously denounced the lies of the German occupant, as well as those of the Belgian Association of Jews, who collaborated with it. He called neither to follow their orders nor to respond when summoned to go to Mechelen, a transit camp before deportation. This book is an attempt to tell Werber's story and give him and his party members and activists the place they deserve in the chronicles of the fight against Nazism.