Tailor in Auschwitz

David Van Turnhout follows the trail of his Jewish grandfather, Ide Leib Kartuz, together with Dirk Verhofstadt. Fleeing anti-Semitism and violence, he came to Antwerp in 1929, where he set up as a tailor. The family he left behind ended up in the Radomsko ghetto. Every family member was gassed in Treblinka, and no one was left. In Belgium, Kartuz joined the resistance, but in 1942 the Nazis arrested him and deported him via Breendonk and the Dossin barracks to Auschwitz. His wife and two children met a gruesome death immediately upon their arrival. He himself survived in a commando of tailors and underwent an inhuman death march to Mauthausen. After the war, he made suits in Antwerp for bankers, diamond dealers and other top executives. He remarried and had two more children. He waged his last battle against the Belgian state for recognition as a Belgian, resistance fighter and war victim. Few people know how exceptionally difficult it was for the Jews in Belgium after the liberation. The authors dig deep into the heart of the Holocaust and investigate every trace from Radomsko to Miami. In the archives of Auschwitz they discovered unpublished testimonies of tailors in Block 1. Completely unexpectedly they also found a niece of Ide in Florida. She survived by hiding as a child in an attic in Brussels. Their search for a year winds between important discoveries and setbacks, but in this tribute an unknown history finally gets a face.