Wanting to be the very best for a lifetime

Working hard to process the horrific war trauma. It was occupational therapy that kept Max Moszkowicz Sr. going. Although really forgetting was not easy.

As a teenager he was a prisoner of the Nazis for 954 days and after returning to the Netherlands he became the most famous criminal lawyer in the Netherlands. Yet the war would never end for him. When Moszkowicz took off his suit in the evening, he saw on his left arm the number (65016) that the Nazis had burned into his skin in September 1942 in Auschwitz concentration camp. “That’s my phone number so I don’t forget,” he told his children when they were little. He preferred not to talk about the war. “It cannot be explained and it cannot be understood.”

On Thursday afternoon, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Max Moszkowicz died at the age of 95. He was born on October 5, 1926 in the German city of Essen. He was the first child of the Polish Jews Feiga Raab and Abraham Moszkowicz. The couple had fled pogroms in Polish Galicia a few years earlier. In 1933 the Moszkowicz family had to flee again when Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. The family was housed in the village of Amby near Maastricht. They were safe there until August 25, 1942. Then they had to report to a school and they were transported by train in a group of three hundred Jewish Limburgers to Westerbork and later deported to Auschwitz.

His mother Feiga (39), sister Helga (12) and brother Joop (2) were gassed immediately upon arrival. His father died a month before the end of the war abgespritzt: killed with a syringe in the heart area. Only Max survived, a total of four concentration camps. He managed to get extra food in Auschwitz as a boxer, among other things, and in January 1945, when he was registered again in Mauthausen camp, he brutally changed his identity: the Jewish prisoner became a Protestant resistance fighter. Moszkowicz was liberated in camp Ebensee on May 6, 1945. A day later he started the return journey on foot and by bicycle. American soldiers eventually dropped him off in front of the cinema in Maastricht. Forty-six pounds of grief.

Four years of gymnasium in one year

The young man was taken care of by the Bessems family in Amby. This family had watched over the family’s possessions during the war. Moszkowicz completed four years of grammar school in one year and on his 22nd birthday he married Bertha, the eldest daughter of the Limburg foster family. At the request of his in-laws, Moszkowicz was baptized Catholic and married in the village church. He and his wife opened a shop for women’s lingerie, corsets and stockings in the Spilstraat in Maastricht: De Spil. Within a year he had a chain of six textile stores.

Despite the commercial success, Moszkowicz was not very pleased with doing business. In 1954 he started studying medicine in the evenings, initially medicine in Utrecht and later law in Nijmegen. Four years later, he nailed a sign to the door in Maastricht: Moszkowicz Advocaten.

The lawyer built up an extensive civil practice but ultimately caused a furore mainly as a criminal lawyer. It was a specialty that most lawyers found too vulgar at the time. The rhetorically very gifted Moszkowicz, however, earned a good living with it. He wrote accounts “with respect for persons,” he called it.

In the courtroom he spoke softly, slowly and without much gesture. „Going slowly, but with a heavy stick’‘, he said, was his style of speech. It was almost always exciting.

According to Harm Brouwer, former judge and boss of the Public Prosecution Service, Moszkowicz was above all “a storyteller”. A counselor who relies on acumen and not on verbal abuse. The lawyer was able to arrange the ‘facts’ in “a different way” and thus made the judge doubtful, according to Brouwer in the biography. the boxer by Moszkowicz which appeared in 2018.

Criminal lawyer for tough guys

Moszkowicz was the most wanted criminal lawyer among heavy boys since the 1970s. A little kidnapper, bank robber or drug lord knew the telephone number of Max Moszkowicz’s Maastricht office (043-254560) by heart. A crook gained criminal prestige as his criminal case in The Telegraph stood with a drawing of him sitting next to Master Moszkowicz.

The lawyer also showed himself to be a master at playing publicity. He often cleverly circumvented the very strict prohibitions on advertising his profession at the time. The Maastricht lawyer wrote columns in De Telegraaf about his alter ego Mr. raab. The column brought him great fame. In maintaining warm ties with the media, he made a mark among colleagues. His most successful pupils, such as Theo Hiddema, Piet Doedens, Geert-Jan Knoops and his youngest son Bram, also liked to seek publicity.

Moszkowicz continued to advocate into old age. Even though he hated wearing “a black dress,” as he called his toga. In his comfortable driving office, a classic Jaguar with driver, he traveled all the districts. There are no really intrinsically bad people, was his motto. The environment, the circumstances can lead someone astray. Would the judge please take that into account. “My tragic background has certainly allowed me to move closer to the human being in misery,” he told interviewer Hugo Camps in 1986.

When the outside world once again harassed him with questions about the professional ethics of the criminal lawyer, Moszkowicz told tirelessly to defend “not the act but the perpetrator”. He only showed war criminals, such as collaborator and SS man Pieter Menten, the door. After all, emotions were not allowed to stand in the way of his legal surgeon work.

He liked to quote old Jewish wisdom, for example from the Talmud. “Justice must be passionately and coolly loved.” Moszkowicz was especially trained at a later age by the orthodox rabbi Jakob Friedrich in Antwerp.

Omnipresent paterfamilias

Max Moszkowicz was an omnipresent paterfamilias. The man who lost his family in the concentration camp cherished his own family. A man with four sons needs no more friends, he said. His children David, Robert, Max Jr. and Abraham all became lawyers. A toga was also ready for the grandchildren at a young age.

Moszkowicz has worked as a lawyer for 46 years. In his last major criminal case, he defended Johan Verhoek, who was on trial for the ‘trial of the century’ for smuggling hundreds of thousands of kilos of hashish from Pakistan. The lawyer lost what he thought was a very bloated case. The war on drugs was a pointless struggle.

Moszkowic, who was a member of the Maastricht city council for sixteen years on behalf of the VVD, had politically right-wing views but was regarded as enlightened in the field of criminal justice. He denounced calls for increasing repression and advocated community service instead of jail time.

In 2004 Moszkowicz suffered a stroke in his favorite restaurant in Maastricht. Since then, he had difficulty walking and was unable to work. Moszkowicz became depressed and very forgetful due to the illness. He lived in an apartment in Lanaken in Belgian Limburg – close to Maastricht – with his Australian girlfriend Elka Melman, who is more than twenty years younger. The two had been in a relationship since 1986. After his illness, Moszkowicz almost only saw his family and otherwise lived almost like a hermit. “Max wanted to be remembered as he was before he had a stroke,” Elka said.

After that stroke, things quickly went downhill for his partnership. The sons Robert, Bram and David were removed from office by the Bar Association for violation of rules of conduct. The stately Maastricht office building on the Wilhelminasingel where Max worked for decades had to be sold in 2015 due to a tax debt. Dramas that the paterfamilias no longer registered.

In fact, Max Moszkowicz Sr. spent his whole life proving that he was the very best and the strongest. Nothing and nobody knocked Max down. He craved recognition: as a father, as a sousaphone player, as a boxer, as a cook, as a magnetizer, as a judoka or lawyer. Great ambitions that arose from his time as a prisoner of war. As he himself said: “If you lost your fighting spirit in the camp, you were dead the next day.”