Home > News > Trust and Betrayal in Brussels
May 29, 2025 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson
In the 1990s, American playwright and screenwriter Alice Austen was working as a lawyer in Brussels. Some elderly neighbors in her elegant Beaux Arts apartment building befriended her, inviting her regularly for afternoon tea. They regaled Austen with stories of the apartment building during World War II, when Germany occupied Belgium.
During the war, residents of the building held starkly opposing political views. Some residents collaborated with the Germans while others secretly aided the Belgian resistance. No one knew whom they could trust, which made living side-by-side tense and fraught. These wartime stories inspired Austen’s historical novel, 33 Place Brugmann, named for that Brussels apartment building. Austen’s skill at creating suspense on stage and screen is on full display in the novel, as is her concern with questions of law and morality.
The novel’s main characters are residents (or former residents) of 33 Place Brugmann; they narrate chapters in turn. We meet François Sauvin, an architect wounded in World War I, and his daughter, Charlotte, a phenomenally talented art student despite being color-blind. The Sauvins live down the hall from the Jewish Raphaël family. Leo Raphaël, an art dealer, is married to Sophia, who helped François raise Charlotte after François’s wife died. The Raphaël children, Julian and Esther, grew up with Charlotte and are her dearest friends.
Masha, a Russian Jewish seamstress, lives in a studio on the top floor. Her lover, Harry, has many secrets, some relating to his service in World War I with the retired colonel who also lives in the building. Other residents include a lawyer, his wife, and their unpleasant son, Dirk, who attends meetings of the collaborationist Flemish-Nationalist party. Nosy Miss Hobert spies on everyone and complains about them to the notary on the ground floor who manages the building and reports to German authorities.
The book opens in 1939 with the sudden disappearance of the Raphaëls and their extraordinary art collection. We soon learn that the Raphaëls have escaped to Great Britain, where they join the Allied war effort, but the fate of the art collection remains a mystery for most of the novel. As Leo Raphaël and others struggle through the war, they reflect on art and why it matters.
The primary characters in 33 Place Brugmann face complex moral choices with life-or-death stakes. Yet even minor characters must decide whether they will help others or themselves during the German occupation. A longtime neighborhood grocer begins adding a surcharge to his food prices, just because he can. In contrast, the local baker generously provides extra bread to people who need it.
In depicting the large and small quandaries her characters face, Austen says she was influenced by the philosophy of Václav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. She became familiar with Havel’s thinking while doing legal work for his government. Havel believed, says Austen, that the responsibility for a regime’s bad actions rests not only with the regime, but with citizens who tolerate the regime’s actions. Austen describes Havel’s moral code:
“The person who walks past a sign in a shop window that says no Blacks or no Jews or no women or no gays is just as responsible as the shopkeeper who puts up the sign, who is just as responsible as the apparatchik who tells the shopkeeper to put up the sign, who is as responsible as the government official who decides that this will be done.”
Few in wartime Brussels fully met Havel’s high standards, but some of Austen’s characters found unexpected courage when it mattered most.
