Back from Antwerp, but without any diamonds

Antwerp was a pleasant surprise as far as being a very cool city with LOTS of shopping, beautiful buildings, international restaurants, chocolates, waffles, and diamonds. The diamond district was really interesting. Most of the business there is run by Jewish families, and of those Jewish families a lot of them seem to be Orthodox Jews. We felt like we'd been transported to Israel when we turned the corner onto one of the diamond dealing streets and were literally surrounded by men dressed in the Orthodox coat and hat with long beards and curls. There were banks, diamond cutters, police, and security cameras everywhere you turned. I can't imagine how much money changes hands in those blocks.

There is a beautiful Gothic church full of Ruben's paintings (he was from Belgium), many gorgeous squares, cobble stoned streets, and lots of history.





Friday morning we woke to drizzle and fog. We wanted to take a boat tour of the world's third largest port, but we figured with the heavy fog we wouldn't see much. We did a walking tour instead. Luc took this first picture.
On the way out of Antwerp we stopped at Fort Breendonk. Fort Breendonk is a fortification built in 1906 as part of the second ring of defenses around the city of Antwerp. During WWII it was used as a Nazi prison/work camp. From Wikipedia:
Fewer than 4,000 prisoners in total were confined in Breendonk during its existence. Most of the non-Jewish prisoners were leftist members of the Belgian resistance or were held as hostages by the Germans. Several hundred people were murdered in the camp through torture, executions, and harsh conditions.
Fort Breendonk has been described as one of the worst camps in all of Europe. It wasn't a concentration or extermination camp, merely a gathering place for later deportation. But the whole of the camp was so cruel and harsh that those that left alive were so weak that survival at the next camp was nearly impossible, often they were so sick and weak that they were lead straight to the gas chamber or died within weeks of their arrival. The regime in the camp was similar if not ever harsher than in an actual concentration camp. Fewer than 10% of the nearly 4000 inmates survived the war.