His father. a mining engineer. died a month before the outbreak of the First World War. and his mother. left with five young children. fled to England. The children remembered shivering with fear at the sight of the German Zeppelins. and they returned to Belgium in 1919 to find their family home totally destroyed. No doubt it was this early experience of the devastation of war that inspired in Father de Jaegher the abundance of compassion he was ever to show for refugees and victims of war in a life that was to see vast numbers of both. As a young lad of 15. he happened to encounter his destiny in the person of a fellow Belgian. the Reverend Vincent Lebbe. who had been for many years a missionary of the Gospel in China. The imagination of the young Raymond caught fire from the zeal of Father Lebbe. as he labored tirelessly in Europe on behalf of Chinese students who had been stranded in France by the failure of a ChineseFrench bank. a bank with close ties to the Communist Party in France.
Keywords matched
refugees