Metadata: Henri Buch archives
Collection
- Country:
- Belgium
- Holding institution:
- Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society
- Holding institution (official language):
- Centre d’Études et de Documentation Guerre et Sociétés Contemporaines
- Postal address:
- Luchtvaartsquare 29 / Square de l’Aviation 29, 1070 Bruxelles (Anderlecht)
- Phone number:
- +32 (0)2 556 92 11
- Web address:
- http://www.cegesoma.be/
- Email:
- cegesoma@cegesoma.be
- Reference number:
- CHRDWConS-Brussels-AA 1309 and AA 1591
- Title:
- Henri Buch archives
- Title (official language):
- Archief Henri Buch
- Creator/accumulator:
- Buch, Henri
- Date(s):
- 1945/1956
- Extent:
- 26 folders
- Scope and content:
- We firstly note documents (correspondence, reports, working documents) produced by Henri Buch in his capacity as a jurist. The rest of the fonds concerns his involvement for former political prisoners and resistance members and their organisations. It concerns i.a. reports, correspondence, internal documents such as working papers, regulations, circulars, bookkeeping records, etc., concerning: the resistance in the immediate post-war period (the organisations Solidarité and the Conseil national de la Résistance), associations of political prisoners (their founding, unification, splits), the remembrance of the 10th anniversary of the liberation of the camps (1955), etc. Lastly, we mention the documentation concerning relevant laws and regulations concerning former resistance members and political prisoners.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Henri Buch was born in 1910 in Paris, as the youngest son of Grigori Buch and Lea Hirschmann, emigrants from the czarist empire. In 1912 the family moved to Antwerp. They fled to England at the outbreak of the First World War and moved to Amsterdam in 1915. In 1919 the Buch family returned to Antwerp. Henri studied at the Koninklijk Atheneum. He obtained, like his older sister Edith, a PhD in law at the ULB. From 1932 he worked for the liberal lawyer Maurice Janssen. Henri Buch married Tania Bieloch, of Russian Jewish descent. After her decease he married Irma Peiser. Buch clandestinely joined the communist party in 1932; he was responsible for i.a. the redaction of the parliamentary speeches of Joseph Jacquemotte. In 1936 his appointment as the judge of the Rechtbank van Eerste Aanleg in Antwerp sparked a minor political scandal with antisemitic undertones. In 1941 Buch went underground. He fulfilled important functions for the clandestine communist party, i.a. as national commander of the armed partisans. He was arrested in July 1944 and followed the ‘communist’ instead of the ‘Jewish’ trajectory – he was imprisoned in Breendonk, Vught, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg and Schwerin. After the war he played an important role in the Confédération Nationale des Prisonniers Politiques et Ayants droit (CNPPA). He was appointed to the Raad van State in 1947. Buch escaped the anti-communist agitation in the early 1950s relatively unscathed. He taught administrative law at the ULB (from 1961) and was, with Chaim Perelman, the co-director of the Centre de Philosophie du Droit. A few months before his death in 1972 he was also appointed to president of the Raad van State. Henri Buch was buried with military honours. (J. Gotovitch, “Buch, Henri”, in J.-P. Schreiber, Dictionnaire biographique des Juifs de Belgique. Figures du judaïsme belge, XIXe-XXe siècles, Brussel, De Boeck, 2002, pp. 70-72.)
- Access points: persons/families:
- Buch, Henri
- Access, restrictions:
- Consultation of fonds AA 1591 requires the authorisation of the CEGESOMA.
- Finding aids:
- The fonds is described in the CEGESOMA database.
- Links to finding aids:
- http://pallas.cegesoma.be/pls/opac/plsp.getplsdoc?lan=N&htdoc=general/opac.htm
- Yerusha Network member:
- State Archives of Belgium
