Konkowski and Blinbaum families papers

Menachem (Maurice) Benzion Konkowski (1905-1966) was born in Warsaw, Poland, to Marja Fajgla Binstock (b. in Bedzin) and Zalman Josek Konkowski (d. 1933). He had a brother Adolf Konkowski (b. 1903) and a sister Sonja Linderman. Menachem immigrated to Brussels, Belgium, where he established a metalworking shop called Selecta that made clasps for handbags. He married Ita Blinbaum (b. 1904) who was born in Pabianice, Poland to Michael Jakub and Yachieta Zilbersac (1876-1963). Her family immigrated to Belgium in the late 1920s, and her father owned a textile factory called Astoria that manufactured fabric used to make ties. Ita and Menachem had two daughters: Renée (b. 1935) and Claudine (b. 1938).

In May 1940, Belgium was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Anti-Jewish laws were immediately enacted, Jewish property and businesses were confiscated, and Jews were banned from certain professions. By 1942, all Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David, and Jewish men were subject to forced labor. That year, Menachem made arrangements to pay Aurelia Parent to hide his young daughters, as well as his brother’s daughters Henriette and Marja, and his sister’s daughter Lilianne. The girls lived in the Etterbeck section of Brussels and were taught to tell people that they attended school with the nuns for a few hours daily. Menachem and Ita lived in hiding in a room next to their Selecta metal shop, and Adolf and his wife lived nearby. The parents and children would occasionally meet briefly on street corners. The Germans kept the Selecta workshop active in case its metal working capabilities were needed for the war effort, but they never discovered the hidden space at the back of the factory used by the resistance to produce false documents and store valuables and weapons.

In late 1941, Menachem joined the Belgian resistance. He adopted the nom de guerre Moliere, and founded and commanded a group of primarily Jewish resistance fighters known as the Moliere Group. The unit was part of the 9th Brigade of the Belgian Nationalist Movement in Uccle, a civil resistance organization, and Menachem held the rank of Commanding Major. He also worked with the Comité de Défense des Juifs (CDJ) and other resistance organizations.

By early 1942, the Moliere Group had nearly 200 members. Menachem organized the Brigade into specialized units that could resist and sabotage German rule in multiple ways. The Shock section was an armed resistance unit that performed assaults of German units and acts of sabotage. The Information service created lists of traitors and collaborators and gathered military, political, and economic information. The Press service was a major producer and distributor of clandestine publications in German and Yiddish, including Unser Wort and Flambeau. The Social service aided families in need of basic provisions such as clothing and food or in danger of deportation. There was also a False Documents service, a Medical service, and eventually, a Purge service.

Menachem managed the Shock section which engaged in several armed attacks against German military and police units to seize weapons. The arms and munitions were stored in two warehouses in Brussels. This unit also sabotaged German equipment and vehicles. One of the warehouses was in a location owned by the Association of Jews in Belgium (AJB), a Jewish council organized by the Germans to register Jews for forced labor and deportation. Menachem was stationed in this warehouse in the guise of a coat clerk to safeguard the weapons cache his group had acquired. The Moliere Brigade viewed the AJB as a collaborationist organization that exploited their fellow Jews by charging people large sums of money to be left off labor and deportation lists. This resentment continued after the war when the AJB claimed that Menachem’s only role at the warehouse was as a coat check receptionist uninvolved in the resistance. The Moliere information service was run by Abraham Domb under the alias Ali. It gathered information on companies and people working directly or indirectly to support the German occupying authorities or the Wehrmacht. This information was used to encourage such collaborationists to cease cooperating with the Germans either voluntarily or as a result of threats by the resistance or, as the war continued, by elimination.

In the fall of 1944, the Shock section joined Allied Forces in the fight to liberate Brussels in the Soignes Forest and countryside on the outskirts of the city. Brussels was liberated in early September 1944. At the war’s end, the Moliere Group had been reduced to 130 members through deportation and execution by the Germans. Menachem’s sister Sonja Linderman and her husband were killed in Auschwitz. During the war, Menachem and his unit had secretly removed all the materials and some equipment from the Blinbaums’ textile factory Astoria, which enabled the family to resume their business quickly after the war and provided a living for four families. Ita’s parents had been hidden by employee Jeanne de Bruyn and her family during the war. Postwar, Menachem supported and supplied weapons to Haganah, the Jewish underground army in Palestine, during the fight for Independence. Menachem was honored by the governments of Belgium and Poland for his bravery and resistance activity during World War II.