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When Stanford lecturer Janine Zacharia received the unfinished manuscript of Israel Cappell’s Holocaust memoir in a Word document, she recognized its importance.
It was a rare, first-person account of the Holocaust in Belgium and was written in English, which was not Cappell’s first language. Zacharia later learned from Sarah Abrevaya Stein, a Holocaust expert and history professor at UCLA, that it is one of very few English-language memoirs documenting how the Jews of Belgium lived, survived and died during World War II. It was also one of the few memoirs in any language written by a survivor of the Mechelen camp, where he and his family were held after their arrest in 1944.
Zacharia, who worked as Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post before she began teaching journalism at Stanford, had a personal tie to Cappell as well. His daughter, Netty Gross-Horowitz, was a fellow journalist and close friend of Zacharia’s. Gross-Horowitz had labored for years to transcribe her father’s story, which he wrote by hand in a series of spiral notebooks starting in 2012 when he was 80. He wrote it for his descendants and wanted it published so the story could reach a wider audience, according to Gross-Horowitz’s brother Ken Cappell.
After Gross-Horowitz died in 2021, Ken Cappell spoke to Zacharia about his desire to see his father’s work published. Zacharia didn’t hesitate.
“I did it to honor Netty, but it’s really a great read,” she told J.
Knowing that she couldn’t do the job on her own, she turned to Stein, a longtime friend. The two academics did the heavy lifting of copyediting and preparing the text for publication, and Stein recruited three UCLA undergrads and a visiting graduate researcher, all fellows of the Alan Leve Center for Jewish Studies, to do the gumshoe work of verifying names and dates, adding historical footnotes and standardizing spellings.
“With Many Miracles: A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium” was published earlier this year. Research was funded by the Leve Center and the Cappell family.
Discussing the book at a March webinar sponsored by the Leve Center and the Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stein noted the unique collaboration between professors and students on this project.
“I want to point out how extraordinary it is in a world-class university to have the opportunity to work so closely with undergraduates,” she said.
Israel Cappell was born to a Hasidic family in Wodz, Poland, in 1922. They moved to Brussels, Belgium’s capital, in 1930, joining a flood of refugees that pushed the city’s Jewish population to between 65,000 and 70,000 by the time of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Fearing persecution, the family joined thousands of other Jewish refugees trying to escape by foot to France, but were turned back. They hid in three separate buildings until the SS captured them on April 27, 1944, and sent them to the Mechelen deportation camp, where most of Belgium’s Jews were interned before being sent to Auschwitz.
Of the more than 25,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz from Mechelen, just over 1,200 survived. The Cappells survived deportation because of a fortuitous act by Cappell’s brother, Charles, who in 1942 registered the family with the Palestine Exchange Lists, a little-known program that sought to trade Zionist Jews in Europe for Germans in British Mandate Palestine. He knew the officials in the Brussels Palestine Office because of his time in Bnei Akiva, a Zionist youth group.
In the end, some 500 European Jews were saved from death by being registered on these lists, including most of the Cappell family. More than 200 Jewish prisoners were released from Bergen-Belsen alone, in June 1944, traded for Germans held by the British. Still, by war’s end, half of Belgium’s Jews were dead.
Cappell’s description of their life on the run and the horrors of daily life in Mechelen are rich in detail yet never overwhelming. His lyrical writing style is highly engaging, and he recounted stories that are not well known, such as how the Jewish communities of Antwerp and Brussels helped the refugees from the East, and what it was like on the mass exodus to France. His stories counter those who contend the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths. Many fought back, and many tried everything to escape.
Cappell immigrated to the United States with his new wife in 1950 and spent the rest of his life in the heavily Jewish Rego Park-Forest Hills section of Queens, New York. He died at age 99 in 2021 — just five months before his daughter’s death and before he could see his memoir published. But his son said he would have been very pleased with how the memoir turned out.
“My father was always struck by people’s behavior, good and bad,” Ken Cappell said during the webinar. “He singles out people for their kindness.” Israel Cappell wrote, for example, about a British medic who saw the family on the road and ripped his shirt to make a sling for one of them with an injured arm. He also mentioned a “number of non-Jewish Belgians who risked their lives to help them,” Ken Cappell said.
The three undergrads spoke during the webinar about their trip to Belgium in May 2023. They visited Kazerne Dossin, a Holocaust museum and research center on the site of the former Mechelen camp, and were given hundreds of documents related to the Cappell family, including proof of their registration on the Palestine Exchange Lists. They took photos of the buildings where the family hid and met with experts to verify names and dates.
“It was quite emotional, a very difficult place to visit,” Michaela Esposito, 20 and a junior at UCLA, told J.
A Livermore native, Esposito is not Jewish but said she’s been interested in Holocaust history since childhood. “I always felt like the Holocaust was an event that everyone needed to be more educated about, and it wasn’t covered as in-depth as it should have been in my history classes,” she said.
Zacharia said she saw the impact this project had on the students and believes it could inspire other survivor families to publish their own stories. “If we’re looking for ways to make the Holocaust relevant today, maybe this could be replicated,” she said.
Esposito agreed. “Working on this project made me so engrossed,” she said during the webinar. “Hearing Israel’s story makes me wonder how many other stories are out there, waiting to be heard.”