The Story behind The Diamond Courier
The ornate stone façade of Antwerp Central Station with its grand dome, turrets and arched glass window rising above the station square.
I’ve lived close to Antwerp for most of my life and have always been fascinated by this city at the mouth of the River Scheldt, with its rich history and love of good food. It is a city that has produced painters like Peter Paul Rubens, writers such as Willem Elsschot, and designers including Dries van Noten and Raf Simons.
But Antwerp has another glittering heart: its diamond industry.
The diamond district, also known as the Diamond Quarter (Diamantkwartier) and often called the Square Mile, is an area in the centre of Antwerp. It consists of several square blocks covering no more than about one square mile.
Although much of the gem cutting and polishing historically carried out in Antwerp has moved to countries with lower labour costs, about 84% of the world’s rough diamonds still pass through the district, making it the largest diamond centre in the world. With a workforce of around 30,000 people, it remains one of Antwerp’s most important industries.
The Beurs voor Diamanthandel building in Antwerp's diamond district, its name carved above classical columns.
Within the district is the Antwerp World Diamond Centre and four trading exchanges, including the Diamond Club of Antwerp and the Beurs voor Diamanthandel, both founded by Hasidic diamantaires, as well as the Antwerpsche Diamantkring and the Vrije Diamanthandel.
The neighbourhood has long been dominated by Jewish diamantaires, alongside Jain Indian, Lebanese Maronite Christian and Armenian dealers. Historically, Yiddish was one of the principal languages spoken on the diamond exchange, and no business was conducted on Saturdays.
Behind these elegant buildings, however, lies a complicated wartime legacy: one of brilliance, betrayal, survival and silence.
As I was writing World War II fiction at the time, I wanted one of my novels to explore this difficult chapter of Antwerp’s history. That became The Diamond Courier, the story of a young British woman who is drawn into the dangerous task of smuggling precious diamonds out of occupied Antwerp and bringing them safely to London.
Although Lili Hamilton’s story and her contacts with the Goldmunz family in Antwerp are fictional, many real stories exist of diamonds being hidden and smuggled out of the city to keep them from Nazi hands.
The Black Falcon, a 612.34-carat black carbonado diamond shaped like a falcon's head
While researching The Diamond Courier, I had the honour of corresponding with the Belgian historian Eric Laureys, author of Meesters van het diamant. De Belgische diamantsector tijdens het nazibewind (Masters of the Diamond: The Belgian Diamond Sector during the Nazi Occupation). He generously answered my many questions and even read The Diamond Courier before publication, kindly giving it his approval.
His book offers a rare and meticulously documented look at how the Nazi occupation reshaped Antwerp’s Jewish diamond industry, both through brutal suppression and, more unexpectedly, through moments of calculated tolerance.
The Antwerp Diamond Industry Before the War
By the late 1930s Antwerp was already one of the world’s great diamond centres. More than 25,000 people worked in the trade as cutters, polishers, dealers and brokers. The Jewish community stood at the heart of this world, particularly on the commercial and export side. Many families had come from Eastern Europe and worked alongside Flemish artisans in a close-knit, highly skilled industry.
Tolerance, Then Seizure
When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, the pattern of occupation was anything but uniform. Unlike Amsterdam, where the Jewish diamond industry was seized almost immediately, Antwerp’s Jewish diamantaires were, for a time, allowed to continue working.
Why?
Because the Nazis needed them. Their expertise could not easily be replaced.
That uneasy tolerance began to disappear by mid-1942. The SS established the Deutsche Diamant- und Edelstein Gesellschaft, a centralised agency that forced all sales through Aryanised firms in Brussels. Jews who had not yet fled or been arrested were increasingly barred from the trade. Their workshops were closed. Their assets were looted. And their names disappeared from the books.
Resistance Through Stones
But the story didn’t end there. Some diamantaires defied the system. They hid diamonds, passed them to trusted contacts and joined the underground.
Eric Laureys recounts cases in which diamonds were sewn into coat linings and carried across borders by couriers posing as fashion buyers or students. Many of those couriers were women, calm, alert and brave.
It was while reading these accounts that Lili Hamilton slowly began to take shape in my imagination. I wanted her courage to be rooted in the real acts of ordinary people whose names history has largely forgotten.
The smuggled stones were sold or used to finance escape networks, bribe collaborators and keep Resistance organisations alive. These were quiet acts of defiance, but vital ones.
Aftermath and Reconstruction
After the war Antwerp slowly rebuilt its diamond trade. Some Jewish families returned, shattered and scarred, and attempted to reclaim what they had lost. Many others settled in the newly established state of Israel or in cities such as New York and London, where new diamond centres developed.
Yet Antwerp remained closely tied to the diamond trade, and new firms gradually rose in place of the old, although the shadow of wartime looting and collaboration never completely disappeared.
Laureys’s work does more than expose injustice. It restores dignity to those who resisted, even in the smallest ways: those who hid a pouch of uncut diamonds instead of handing them over, and those who crossed a border knowing they might never come back.
After reading his book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the unnamed men and women who carried diamonds through occupied Europe, unarmed, untrained and utterly brave.
It was then that Lili Hamilton came to life.
Although The Diamond Courier is a work of fiction, it is firmly rooted in the courage of those forgotten men and women whose quiet acts of resistance helped save lives.
This remains one of the lesser-known stories of the Belgian Resistance, and I’m deeply grateful to Eric Laureys for helping illuminate this forgotten chapter of history and for so generously sharing his knowledge while I was writing The Diamond Courier.
Further Reading
· Eric Laureys, Meesters van het diamant (Lannoo, 2005)
· The Plundering of Antwerp’s Jewish Diamond Dealers, 1940–1944 – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum symposium
· Antwerp Diamond Centre archives and post-war restitution files (Royal Library of Belgium)
