Morgen-Duchesne family. Collection

Moszek Morgen was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1912. He became a mechanic, later a jeweler, and in 1928 he emigrated to Lüttich (Liège/Luik), Belgium, to work in his uncle’s bike shop. In the 1930s Moszek moved to Anderlecht, where he married Suzanne Duchesne, a non-Jewish Belgian artist. Their son Serge Morgen was born in 1939. On 9 May 1942, Moszek Morgen was arrested at a café by the Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst and interned in the prison of Saint-Gilles, Brussels. He was transferred to the Fort of Breendonk on 13 June 1942. That same month, his wife Suzanne Duchesne was convicted by the Oberfeldkommandantur in Brussels to three weeks in prison for trying to bribe a Sipo-SD member to free her husband. After her release, Suzanne continued her resistance activities. She forged IDs for, among others, American and British pilots shot down over Belgium. On 15 January 1943, Moszek Morgen and 36 other Jewish prisoners were transferred from the Fort of Breendonk to the Dossin barracks. Later that same day, Moszek and his companions were deported from the barracks in Mechelen to Auschwitz-Birkenau via transport XIX. He did not survive deportation. Just two months earlier, in November 1942, his wife had given birth to their daughter Michele Nadine Morgen. Suzanne Duchesne and both her children survived the war. In 1947, she married the American stockbreeder Jacob Kaplan, whom she had met not long after the liberation of Belgium. The couple first settled in Brussels and in 1949, their daughter Marianne was born. Jacob Kaplan, Suzanne Duchesne and the three children – Serge, Michele and Marianne – emigrated to the United States in 1949. In 2006, daughter Marianne Kaplan (married Lods) visited the former Dossin barracks in Mechelen and in 2013 she published her parents’ war story.

The copies of these documents were gathered by Marianne Lods-Kaplan, daughter of Suzanne Duchesne and Jacob Kaplan, while researching her parents' war story. A book on the subject was published in 2013.

Marianne Lods, 2006