Herbeumont

Here, in Herbeumont, lived the heroine Qian Xiuling . In the East she is known as the ' Schindler of China ', but her exploits remain quite unknown in our own country. The story is told by Xu Feng in the book Forget Me .

Qian Xiuling was born in Yixing in 1912. She was a Chinese-Belgian scientist who was awarded a medal for saving nearly 100 lives in Belgium during the Second World War . A street has been named after her and a sixteen-part drama series about her life has been made for Chinese television. In 1929 she left for Belgium to study chemistry. In 1933 she married Grégoire de Perlinghi, a Belgian doctor and they went to live in Herbeumont .

When her village of Herbeumont was occupied by the German army in June 1940, a Belgian young man blew up a military train by hiding a mine under the railway. The young man was sentenced to death, but Qian realized she knew the German general in command of Belgium. She had known General Alexander von Falkenhausen when he was still working in China as part of the then Sino-German cooperation. She wrote a letter and traveled to Falkenhausen who decided to spare the boy for humanitarian reasons.

Dromos