This is the question volleyed around tram cars and at red lights as people head to the cinema to see the movie Wil the title is sometimes stylised as WIL , which is quickly becoming one of the most successful Flemish films in recent history. It is based on the bestselling book of the same name by author Jeroen Olyslaegers. If the commute to see the movie was filled with dinner table debates and jaunty assertions of philosophical viewpoints, the ride home will be silent.
Olyslaegers recognises the dilemmas. Sitting at a coffee shop on Wisselstraat and Oude Beurs, not far from the Vleeshuis where he wrote his novel Wildevrouw, the year-old author pretends not to have noticed that the people at a nearby table have recognised him from the nature of the conversation and are not-so-inconspicuously eavesdropping.
Here in the city of Antwerp, the author is surrounded by the setting of his story, both Wil and his own. Antwerp is where Olyslaegers went to school, lived and worked. And Antwerp is where an estimated 9, Jewish people were pulled from their homes and sent to die in concentration camps during the Holocaust assuming they were not killed beforehand by mob or murder, state-sanctioned or otherwise.
Antwerp presents itself as a unique case, according to research from Belgian scholar Lieven Saerens. In his search for an explanation for why the number would be so much higher, Saerens eventually lands at the conclusion that a critical factor was the extent of local cooperation — the willingness of the people and authorities of Antwerp to help their German occupiers.
The archived documents have been studied by Saerens and Herman Van Goethem, a Belgian historian, jurist, professor and director of the Kazerne Dossin museum and memorial in Mechelen. Saerens was later awarded the Hubert Pierlot prize and the prize of the Province of Antwerp for his thesis about the attitude of the people of Antwerp towards Jews from to But as time puts more and more distance between the names in the archives and their ancestors, the reality will be microdosed.
