The death of Marcel Liebman in March of this year has deprived us of a major twentieth-century historian whose roots lay in classical Marxism untainted by leaden orthodoxies or passing fashions. Born in 1929 in Brussels, Liebman was educated in the Belgian capital and at the London School of Economics, subsequently becoming professor of political science at Brussels University where he had a circle of devoted followers. But the number of students whom he helped to understand the social realities of the world around them is far greater than any seat of learning could ever accommodate.

Liebman is known to readers of New Left Review mainly as the author of several important works analysing the development of the Soviet Union. His volume on The Russian Revolution, published in 1967, was translated into various languages including English (Cape, 1970). This was followed by Leninism under Lenin (Cape, 1975), for which he was awarded the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. This remarkable reevaluation of the subject provoked a great deal of discussion as it led the author to original conclusions on the origins of Stalinism. Les Socialistes Belges (Brussels 1979), Liebman’s ambitious large-scale work on the history of the Belgian Socialist movement, remains unfinished. But the one published volume, covering the years 1885–1914, offers an unrivalled account, throbbing with life, of the revolt of a class which gradually acquired organizational forms for further social struggles.

Liebman’s Né Juif footnote＊ is a fragment of an autobiography which deals with the years from 1939 to 1945. The Liebmans were a middle-class JewishBelgian family established in Brussels which observed traditional customs and religious rites. The father, a fervent Belgian patriot, had been interned by the Germans in 1914; law-abiding and conservative, he hated the Soviet Union because it ‘rejected God’ and ‘the idea of the Motherland’. When the Second World War broke out, Marcel was ten and his brothers were three, eight and twelve years old.

The first two years of the war were difficult but bearable. Then, in 1941 the occupying authorities set up the Association of Belgian Jews (Judenrat), which consisted of prominent and affluent businessmen presided over by the Grand Rabbi. This collaborationist institution was charged with supplying the Germans with a register of all Jews resident in Belgium and subsequently with organizing what was euphemistically termed ‘emigration’—in reality, mass deportations, first to the socalled labour camps and later to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The Association in a way relieved the occupying power of some of its dirty administrative work and lulled the victims’ vigilance by presenting the recruitment as a duty which only cowards wanted to shirk. Up to 1942 thirteen thousand Jews were deported, and most of them went ‘voluntarily’ following the Association’s instructions.