Jeannine Burk

Jeannine Burk was born on September 15, 1939 in Brussels, Belgium. When World War II started, her mother, Sarah Bluman Rafalowicz took her three children including Jeannine into hiding. Though Belgium was meant to be neutral territory during the war, Hitler disregarded the treaties and with the help of the King of Belgium himself, he took the war into the country and began concentration camps there. Jeannine’s father took her to a safe house where she was to live for two years, never mistreated, but never loved, and never allowed to go further than the backyard for the whole two years she lived there. Jeannine did not have friends during the war, at least not ones of flesh and blood. She had to make them up, and these imaginary friends were all she had for two years.
“I do not remember being hugged and kissed. That was my life for two years” (Jeannine Burk).
At one point, some neighbors ratted them out to the Gestapo. They came and invaded the house, taking her father away and trying to take her mother. She refused to go, saying: "You can shoot me here, but I will not leave my daughter." They saw Jeannine’s older sister who was in a body cast due to a bone disease called osteomyelitis and said they would come back later. Jeannine’s mother made a phone call to a Catholic hospital and they agreed to take her daughter. There, Jeannine’s sister spent the next two years in an isolation ward to be protected from the Nazis.
Jeannine remembers her mother coming to get her in the Autumn of 1944, and then going back for her sister. Her brother, too returned to the house where they had lived. The family was complete again, all except for Jeannine’s father. He was never to return, and they found out later that he had been gassed in Auschwitz. Her mother died as well in February 1950. She died of breast cancer when she was only 45, and Jeannine remembers one of the last things she said to her was: “You gotta be a good girl."
Some time later, Jeannine’s sister sent her to live in America. She remembers leaving Belgium as the hardest thing she ever had to do.
“Leaving Belgium was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me. I was close to my brother and my sister. To me it looked as if they did not want me anymore now that they were married” (Jeannine Burk).
Jeannine landed in New York City on her twelfth birthday. She remembers trying to hide so that she could take the plane back to Belgium. She was adopted by a family called the Savages, and says now that she regrets having been so.
“It would have been better if they had not adopted me. I guess they did the best they could” (Jeannine Burk).
Jeannine married once when she was young, and then got divorced. In 1970, she met her current husband, Maurice and had six children. Sometime in the 1970’s or 80’s she began speaking to the public about her memories of the Holocaust. In 1985 she spoke at a convention in Philadelphia where a number of other survivors also spoke, including Elie Wiesel.
“I was with a lot of people who had experienced harder things than I had. But we were all survivors” (Jeannine Burk).
Jeannine says that she would like to thank the woman who took care of her while she was in hiding, or at least thank her daughters but she does not know who she was.
When asked if she can forgive what happened to her, she says she cannot.
“People ask me, can I forgive? I can't. I cannot forgive. I blame the German people a great deal because I feel they were passive. They turned away. They may have the audacity to say they did not know. That is unacceptable. Until they can own up to it, I can't forgive” (Jeannine Burk).

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