Metadata: Henri Buch papers
Collection
- Country:
- Belgium
- Holding institution:
- Archives of the Université Libre de Bruxelles
- Holding institution (official language):
- Archives de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles
- Postal address:
- Campus du Solbosch AX1.222, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50 / Franklin Rooseveltlaan 50, 1000 Bruxelles
- Phone number:
- +32 02/650.35.66
- Email:
- archives@ulb.ac.be
- Reference number:
- ArUnLib-Brussels-102PP
- Title:
- Henri Buch papers
- Title (official language):
- Papiers Henri Buch
- Creator/accumulator:
- Buch, Henri
- Date(s):
- 1929
- Extent:
- 1 folder
- Scope and content:
- This fonds contains 8 letters sent from Buch to Pierre Combier that were returned by the postal service.
- 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 anti-Semitic 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:
- Access requires the authorisation of the archivist of the ULB.
- Yerusha Network member:
- State Archives of Belgium
