About the Family

Julius, Ella and Louis ANDRIESSE are presumed to have received Portuguese visas in Bordeaux in June 1940.

Hugo and Elisabeth Jacoba ANDRIESSE and their chauffeur are presumed to have received Portuguese visas in Bayonne in June 1940.

Julius, Ella and their son Louis were Dutch citizens, living in Belgium when the war broke out. Together with their daughter Elisabeth ("Liesje") Henriette Louise Andriesse (1908-1944), her husband Abraham Pinkus Spira (1903-1949) and their son John/Jean Spira (1937-1944) they attempted to cross into France during the German invasion. Liesje's husband Abraham Pinkus Spira was Polish and had become stateless in Belgium. As a result, Liesje and her young son Jean were also stateless. They were turned back at the French border. Some time later they made it into France without papers, where they remained in hiding trying to find a way to flee to Spain, Portugal and beyond. Ahead of his wife and son, Abraham crossed the Pyrenees mountains clandestinely into Spain in Oct. 1942 and was briefly interned there. After an earlier failed escape attempt, Liesje and Jean tried to follow him covertly into Spain in June of 1944, but they were betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo in France. Via Drancy transit camp, they were sent to their deaths upon arrival on July 4, 1944, in Auschwitz. Liesje was 36 and Jean was 6 years old. Abraham Spira survived the war a broken man. He briefly remarried, fathered a daughter and died in 1940 (aged 46).

Julius, Ella and Louis continued into France and after a long, difficult 100 day journey, eventually made it to Portugal and on to the Netherlands East Indies, via Mozambique. A year later they were interned there in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. They survived the war. Hugo Andriesse was an older brother of Julius. Hugo and his wife Elisabeth Andriesse-Spanjaard had Dutch nationality and had been living in Belgium for over 40 years, where he was the director of the Van den Bergh Margarine Factory in Brussels. They had left Belgium before the Nazi invasion and had put their extensive art collection in safekeeping at a museum in Brussels and elsewhere. In April 1940 they were in Nice, France (see photo below) and from there they attempted to escape to Portugal with their driver. On June 18, 1940, the Dutch legation in Lisbon wrote a letter to the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (see image below) to request the issuance of visas to Hugo, Elisabeth and their driver at the Portuguese Consulate in Bayonne, France. It is presumed that visas were issued to them by the Portuguese Consulate in Bayonne, because they continued on to Portugal. In Lisbon they stayed at the Tivoli Hotel until their departure on Sep. 18th, 1940 on the Excalibur. On Sep. 27, 1940 they reached safety in New York, where they lived out their lives. Their Belgian driver returned to Belgium in their car and pocketed the proceeds from its sale. He later betrayed the location of their hidden art collection to the Nazi's in exchange for money. The Andriesse art collection was then looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and ended up with top members of the Nazi elite, including the Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering. Although much of the collection was returned to the family after WWII, some art objects are still missing. The Jewish Digital Art Recovery Project (JDCRP) devoted a detailed exhibition to the Andriesse art loot in Belgium in 2024/2025 entitled: Stolen Jewish Legacies, the Fate of the Andriesse Collection. In 2023 the book "Verloren" by Ingrid Vander Veken was published (in Dutch) about the WWII plight of Liesje Spira-Andriesse and her son Jean and their ill-fated escape attempt from Nazi persecution. An unpublished manuscript by Walter de Schampheleire & Martine Marneffe exists and will be shared with Holocaust libraries entitled: A Hidden History, The war correspondence by Liesje Andriesse."