Article by Agnès Bensimon

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth convoy leaving the Malines transit camp in Belgium for Auschwitz, with 1,631 Jewish deportees on board, was the target of an action led by resistance fighters to free the passengers. In the end, 236 of them jumped from the train that was destined for extermination. Agnès Bensimon looks back at this act of rebellion – the only one of its kind in Western Europe under Nazi rule during the Second World War.

On 3 October 1989, at around 6 pm, Dr. Joseph Wybran, a leading doctor and president of the C.C.O.J.B, the Belgian Jewish federation , was shot at close range in the parking lot of the Erasmus hospital in Brussels. Thirty-three years later, justice has still not been served. Agnès Bensimon reviews for K. the twists and turns of an investigation into a murder whose treatment by the Belgian police and justice system raises questions.

The departure of the Jews from Tunisia, generally associated with the consequences of the Six Day War, was in fact rooted in a Tunisian-French conflict known as the Bizerte Crisis, which took place five years earlier. The accusation of treason leveled against the Jews of Bizerte, and their consequent rescue by Israel, marked the beginning of the rapid disappearance of any Jewish presence in Tunisia. Writing for K., Agnès Bensimon, a specialist in the history of the Jews in North Africa, tells us about the last days of the Jewish community of Bizerte.