A Jewish man who was saved by a Belgian family as a child during the Holocaust was reunited with descendants of his rescuers for the first time, nearly 80 years later.
David Rossler, who was born Daniel Langa in Belgium in 1938, met with the descendants of Georges Bourlet in Auderghem, Belgium, and visited the home he was hidden in during the persecution of the Jewish community. Rossler was only 5 years old when he and his mother were saved in 1944.
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“It was an incredibly emotional day for us. I was able to see, with my own eyes, the place where my father was kept safe from the Germans all those years ago,” Lionel Rossler, David’s son who accompanied his father, told the online genealogy company MyHeritage. “My father had the incredible opportunity to personally thank the descendants of his rescuer for all they did for him and for us.”
The Bourlet family, which consisted of Georges and his four teenage and young adult children, Paul, Jacques, Anne-Marie, and Christiane, saved David Rossler and his mother from being sent to concentration camps. But David Rossler’s father and uncle were arrested and never returned from the camps.
David Rossler recalled how Bourlet feared he would be discovered and denounced for hiding Jews toward the end of the war and spent days calling in sick for work without telling his family. Bourlet, who was Catholic, instead would go to a cafe to avoid being seen and then go home as if he was returning from work.
“If I had Mr. Bourlet in front of me now, I would want to kiss him,” David Rossler said tearfully in a video shared with the Washington Examiner. “I would want to say ‘thank you,’ with all my body and with all my life. If I am alive, if I have a family of which I am very proud and very happy, it is thanks to him.”
The meeting was orchestrated by Lionel Rossler and MyHeritage, who tracked down the descendants of Bourlet’s family. Rossler said he spent years trying to find the Bourlet family for his father but had no success.
In January of last year, Rossler sent a Hail Mary to a social media group, asking for help and whether anyone knew the family. The call was answered by Marie Cappart, the country manager for MyHeritage in Belgium, who worked with Rossler to track the family down. After talking to multiple grandchildren of Georges Bourlet, the families agreed to meet at the house David was hidden in, which the family still owned.
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Members of the family said they had heard bits and pieces of Rossler’s story over the years but said they were only told a few times over the years that a Jewish family had been hidden in the house during the war.
Friday marks International Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
