Mandel, Henoch

Henoch (Henri) Mandel, born in Wieliczka (Poland), migrated to Antwerp in 1913 in order to study and to escape the religious orthodoxy of his family. He came into contact with German communists while staying in the Netherlands during World War I. At the end of the war Mandel went to Germany to offer his services to the communist movement. In Berlin he met leaders such as Radek and Pieck, and became one of the founders of the Soviet press bureau. After the murders on Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Mandel fled back to Antwerp (1919) and abstained from political activity in the following decades. Mandel’s fairly successful diamond trading business suffered from the crisis of 1930. He later worked as an insurance and mortgage agent, and briefly as the manager of a mineral water and lemonade factory. Mandel married Rosa Mateles, like him of Polish-Jewish descent, in 1921. They had two sons, Ernest Esra and Michel. By the end of the 1930s, Henri Mandel had become a sympathizer of the Fourth International. The house of the Mandels was a meeting place for Belgian Trotskyists and German and Austrian refugees. Mandel, in hiding since 1942, became the driving force behind a resistance group publishing the clandestine newspapers Vrank en Vrij, Het Vrije Woord and Das Freie Wort. Henri Mandel died of a heart condition in 1953.