The non-profit organization Helden van het Verzet and KVS warmly welcome you to a new Resistance Café in Brussels. An evening of storytelling featuring three inspiring resistance stories of ordinary people against the Nazi occupier. Junior Akwety will be co-hosting the evening with Dany Neudt and providing the music. You will discover three moving stories of resistance:

• Andrée Guelen, told by her daughter Anne Hersovici
• François Kamanda, presented by Eva Kamanda and Kristof Bohez
• Ruben Gerardo Salinas, told by his son Gerardo Salinas

Andrée Guelen
Andrée Guelen Herscovici was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1921. At the age of 18, she began teaching at a local school. This was the year during which the Nazis occupied Brussels. At school, Andrée noticed that children were disappearing from her class. She investigated and learned that the children had been taken to concentration camps because they were Jewish. This angered her and she undertook rescue work. Together with another women, Andrée took young children and made dangerous journeys with them to other parts of the country, where the kids were placed safely with a non-Jewish families. Almost 1,000 children were rescued.

François Kamanda
A large network of Congolese people in Belgium resisted the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, at great personal risk. After the war, their story — like that of many other African resistance fighters abroad — became a forgotten chapter in Belgian historiography. Actress Eva Kamanda discovered through family research that her Congolese great-grandfather, François Kamanda, was connected to this resistance network. Together with journalist Kristof Bohez, she set out to uncover the role of Congolese people within this hidden history. Their collaboration brought the story of François and many other Congolese in Belgium to light, finally giving recognition to these overlooked resistance fighters. The full story can be found in Een verzwegen leven; onze Congolese geschiedenis in België (Pelckmans) and Une vie sous silence; notre histoire congolaise en Belgique (Racine).

Ruben Gerardo Salinas
Rubén grew up in a working-class family in Argentina and became a doctor, driven by solidarity and a strong sense of responsibility. He started a family with Isabel and had three children. During the increasing political repression in the country following the 1976 coup, his family became involved in the conflict when his brother was abducted. Shortly afterwards, Rubén himself was taken by paramilitary forces and disappeared.

He is one of the approximately 30,000 “desaparecidos” of Argentina’s civil-military dictatorship: a group consisting of activists, trade unionists, intellectuals, political opponents, and ordinary citizens. This system also involved the systematic abduction and appropriation of children, many of whom are still being searched for today.

For years, Rubén’s fate remained unknown, until testimonies in 2008 revealed that he had been held together with his brother in a clandestine detention center, where they were tortured. Both died in captivity.

His story lives on through his family and in the ongoing struggle of human rights organizations for truth, memory, and justice. His son, Gerardo Salinas, a dramaturge at KVS, will present a testimony at Het Verzet Café, in which he will share the story of his father as well as the struggle and resistance of human rights organizations, relatives, and the Argentine people.