04/10/2026
In 1940, following the German occupation of Belgium, David and Alice van Buuren left the country, as they were at risk under the occupying regime.
In Bordeaux, on May 29, 1940, they obtained visas from Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who defied Salazar’s orders to save refugees. They crossed into Portugal, and on June 24, boarded a Pan Am seaplane, the Dixie Clipper, from Lisbon to New York.
For five years, Alice and David lived in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. David supported Jewish institutions worldwide. Alice became an unofficial ambassador for Belgium among America’s great institutions, and the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, Walt Disney were among their circle.
Far from a quiet exile, these were years of intense social and worldly life, dinners, salons, introductions into New York’s elite. The friendships forged there weren’t fleeting wartime bonds: they shaped the couple’s social world for the rest of their lives, feeding directly into the international circle Alice would cultivate for decades after David’s death.
1. Portrait of Alice van Buuren, New York, 1940. Proof print by the Pan-American Photographic Service, 20 West 57th Street.
2. Alice and David van Buuren arriving in New York by boat, 1940. The Statue of Liberty can be seen in the background.
alice 1940 NY1
3. Alice van Buuren in Cleveland, 1942.
arizona 1942
4. Alice van Buuren (right) with a friend and a horse at a ranch in Arizona, 1942.
5. Album page with photographs and a handwritten note, Arizona, 1942.
6. Alice van Buuren in the 1940s.
