Liberté chérie

Liberté chérie (French for "Cherished Liberty") was a Masonic Lodge founded in 1943 by Belgian Resistance fighters and other political prisoners at Esterwegen concentration camp.

[4] The original seven Freemasons of Loge Liberté chérie were: They later initiated, passed, and raised Brother Fernand Erauw, another Belgian.

According to M. Franz Bridoux, former prisoner in Esterwegen's Hut 6, the founding members of Loge Liberté chérie were Rochat, Sugg, Hannecart, Hanson, Somerhausen, Degueldre, and Miclotte.

The Emslandlagercamps were a group of camps whose history is represented by a permanent exhibition in the Documentation and Information Centre in Papenburg, Germany.

These ceremonies (in the maintenance of the secrecy of which, they asked the community of Catholic priests for assistance, "with their prayers") "took place at one of the tables ... after a very highly simplified ritual—whose individual components were however explained to the initiate; that from now on he could participate in the work of the Lodge".

More than a hundred prisoners were in Hut 6, and locked up nearly around the clock — allowed to leave only for a half-hour walk per day, under supervision.

Lodge Master Paul Hanson was moved, and died in the rubble of his prison, during an Allied air bombardment on Essen, on March 26, 1944.

[5] Franz Rochat, a professor, pharmacist, and director of an important pharmaceutical laboratory, was born on 10 March 1908 in Saint-Gilles.

In the spring of 1945 they were involved in the death marches, and although Erauw was 1.84 m tall, he weighed only 32 kg on 21 May 1945 — in the Saint Pierre Hospital in Brussels.

A memorial, created by architect Jean de Salle, was raised by Belgian and German Freemasons on 13 November 2004.

Wim Rutten, the grand master of the Belgian Federation of the Le Droit Humain said during an address: We are gathered here today on this Cemetery in Esterwegen, not to mourn, but to express free thoughts in public."