Carte de Combattant Volontaire de la Resistance of Charles Katzengold
Gift of Georgette Cassen
Id no. 19.85, Document, French
Subject(s): Resistance
Before the war, Katzengold (b. July 24, 1908) was in the diamond business in Antwerp, Belgium. With the outbreak of war, the Katzengolds fled Belgium for the south of France. As a refugee in May 1940, Katzengold joined the Belgian resistance in France and gathered military information. In 1942 Katzengold was arrested by the Nazis at the border between Belgium and France. He was interned first at Dole, France and then at the prisoner of war camp at Beaune-La-Rolande and finally deported to Auschwitz in June 1942. In 1944 he was taken on a Death March to the Gross Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, Germany. He was liberated in May 1945 by the Soviets. His wife and daughter, Henriette and Georgette (later, Cassen), survived the war by living in various places in France under the name Clement (his middle name), thus hiding their Jewish identity.
