Holocaust Orphans Reunited After 59 Years

For 59 years, Leon Schipper has wondered what happened to the little boy he saved during the Holocaust.

The Sherman Oaks resident last saw the boy, then called Max Kohn, when the child was 6.

Schipper, 75, and the boy, who is now 65-year-old Michael Hartogs, both natives of Belgium, were reunited Tuesday at Los Angeles International Airport with the help of the American and the Canadian Red Cross.

They last saw one another in 1944, just after Brussels was liberated from Nazi occupation.

Schipper and Hartogs said their parents were sent to Auschwitz in 1942, where they were killed, along with Hartogs’ older sister and Schipper’s older brother. Schipper’s sister went into hiding in Belgium and the two were reunited after the war.

When his parents were taken to the concentration camp, Schipper was sent to a Jewish orphanage in Brussels.

One day, he and other orphans were walking past a military barracks and found four boys and two girls abandoned in cribs. Schipper, then 14, and the other orphans picked up little Max and the other children and brought them to the orphanage.

Schipper said he and Max were placed in homes around Belgium until the country was liberated. After the war ended, Schipper returned to Brussels and saw Max briefly, but said that was the last he knew of the boy.

Schipper, who moved to the U.S. in 1948, would ask about Max when he visited Brussels every few years, but no one could give him any information.

A year and a half ago, Schipper’s wife, Elise, urged him to seek the help of the Red Cross.

In October, the agency found Hartogs. After a Red Cross worker explained who Schipper was, Hartogs contacted him by e-mail.

“He didn’t remember a darn thing,” Schipper said. “I had to rekindle his memory.”

When Max Kohn was 10, he was adopted by a Canadian family who brought him to Montreal and changed his name to Michael Hartogs. Now he and his wife, Joan, are the parents of four grown children and live in Falls Church, Va., a Washington, D.C., suburb.

Hartogs said he didn’t remember anything before the age of 10.

“Not knowing what happened to me for 10 years, we have a lot of catching up to do,” Hartogs said Tuesday.

He plans to stay with the Schippers for two nights before driving to San Diego to visit his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, who live there.

Hartogs said he owes his life to Schipper, but Schipper said there wasn’t much of a choice to make six decades ago.

“If he stayed there, he was going to go someplace he didn’t want to go,” Schipper said.

Schipper’s wife said that the next two days would be good for the men: “It’s a closure of what happened during the war.”