Biography
Annette Linzer (born Annette Lederman) is the daughter of Mordka and Rajala (Zylberszac) Lederman, a Jewish couple from Lodz who had moved in the 1930s first to Belgium, then to France and then back to Belgium. Annette was born in St. Gaudens, France on June 5, 1940. The family returned to Brussels the following year, where Margo (Marguerite) was born on May 8, 1941. When the round-ups of Jews began in Brussels, Annette's mother made contact with the Belgian underground through a Catholic priest. Annette was placed in hiding with a Christian family, but she was so homesick that her rescuer returned her to her parents. On October 31, 1942, Annette's father was deported to Auschwitz. Her mother then resolved to hide both girls with a Christian family. She made contact with Clementine and Edouard Frans van Buggenhout, who lived in the village of Rumst, half-way between Brussels and Antwerp. The van Buggenhouts had three older children. Their two sons, Roger and Sylvan, were away most of the time in forced labor battalions, but their teenage daughter, Lydia, helped care for the Lederman sisters. While Annette and Margo were in hiding, their mother was deported to Auschwitz on the next to last transport from Belgium in 1944. After learning that both parents had been killed, Clementine and Edouard van Buggenhout sought to adopt the girls, but their village priest would not sanction the adoption since there was no formal indication that this would have been the wish of the parents. When it was determined that the girls' sole surviving uncle could not care for them, they were sent to a series of three Jewish orphanages over the next four and a half years. In 1949 plans were made to move their orphanage en masse to Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah program. Margo and Annette boarded the train with their group, but along the way the train was stopped by police who removed the girls. Unbeknownst to the Lederman sisters, they had been officially adopted by Rabbi Leonard and Leah Mishkin of Chicago, Illinois. The girls arrived in Chicago on May 28, 1950 and moved in with their new family. In 1978 Edouard Frans and Clementine van Buggenhout were officially recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
