Markgravenstraat 93

At that time, Jozef and Hendrik were with the scouts of the 1st Kempen in Herentals and also leader of the scouts group in St.-Jozef-Olen. During the war, they join the secret army. They call themselves the Belgian Tommies, a resistance group whose task is to gather intelligence about the occupation of the occupier and to smuggle downed Allied pilots out of the country.

On March 16, 1943, at 4 o'clock in the morning, Jozef Aerts is taken from his house in the Markgravenstraat by the Gestapo. He is transferred to the prison in the Begijnenstraat in Antwerp, where he is severely tackled by two of his fellow townsmen T. and E. Jozef knows them all too well: T. was just like him with the Belgian Tommies, but now it turns out that it is he who betrayed him. For sixteen days, he is foldered in Antwerp by the two.

Jozef Aerts is sentenced to death on August 18. At the beginning of October 1943 he was deported to Essen, in February 1944 he arrived in the German camp of Esterwegen, and in March 1945 he ended up in the concentration camp of Flossenburg.

There he is sent on a death march with 750 fellow sufferers. Jef had a paralyzed leg, due to polio. It is impossible to imagine how he accomplishes that death journey. In the end, of the 750 prisoners, 200 remain, the rest die from hardship or from the blows they take along the way. For Jef, the story ends on April 12, 1945. While the prisoners can already hear the roar of the guns of the approaching allied armies, he is hanged in an army barracks in Offenburg.

Hendrik Aerts suffered the same fate a few months after the arrest of his brother, four years older, on 19 June 1943. He was also mistreated in prison in the Begijnenstraat. On August 12, he is transferred to the Gross Rosen concentration camp in present-day Poland, where he has to perform slave labor in the huge quarry near the camp.

The inmates at Gross Rosen lived an average of 60 days. On December 18, Hendrik succumbs.

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