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FIRE IN THE EARTH
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means
Christlike Belgian Diamond Workers Union) extremely racial minded. Of
its 22,000 cutters, however, Antwerp had less than 12,000 enrolled in
unions.
Then
the second World War came, and Germany was in command of the Low
Countries. A few of the Dutch cutters escaped to England, but most of
them were trapped in their homeland. A few Belgian cutters escaped, but
most of them fled to France where they, too, were trapped as the Hitler
war machine moved swiftly onward. At the end of 1940 it is believed
that about 3000 Belgian and Dutch cutters had been stranded at
Toulouse, France, captured, and returned to their homes—or to
concentration camps.
Not
many of them went to concentration camps, however. The Germans knew
they had a rich prize, or thought they had. So in June, 1940, they made
desperate efforts to stimulate the diamond-cutting trades of Antwerp
and Amsterdam into action. By August 1 they were optimistically
claiming that everything was going to be all right.
The
rest of this enthralling drama-tragedy we leave to Mr. Sydney H. Ball,
who in his 1941 bulletin, The Diamond Industry in 1940, distributed
privately by Jewelers Circular-Keystone, said:
The
cutting industry for four months of 1941 was more or less normal, but
with the German attack on the Low Countries in May it was completely
disorganized. Normally Belgium and Holland fashioned go per cent, of
the world's cut and in a day the industry saw almost its whole
processing branch wiped out. At present, there are two cutting
industries: the German-controlled, with men and cutting equipment, but
with a meager and irreplaceable stock of rough, and a limited market
for its product—and the free industry, with relatively few cutters and
little equipment, but with rough available and an eager market for cut
goods, particularly the smaller sizes. The free market cannot expand
markedly except after a longtime lag; to properly equip even the
comparatively few Belgian and
(102)
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