36. In 2012, we helped Paulette learn for the first time details about the fate of her biological parents, who were shipped by Nazi soldiers from Belgian concentration camps to the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-controlled Poland. She learned that her father, Chaim Bucholc, was a talented Polish leatherworker, and that he was a close friend to a man named Sijbren de Hoo, who helped save Paulette and her sister Suzy from a Nazi camp. De Hoo’s children told Paulette that their father’s stories of those years were still well remembered, and they even had an artifact — a leather bookcover — that Bucholc had made for his friend de Hoo. They mailed the item to Paulette, which carried the initials “C. B.” — it is the only thing of her parents that she now has in her possession.
