The attack on the Twentieth Convoy from Mechelen

On 19 April 1943 the twentieth transport of Jews from occupied Belgium left the Dossin barracks in Mechelen for Auschwitz-Birkenau. The train carried 1,631 people, among them, according to Belgian studies, 262 children. Late in the evening, a few kilometres outside the town, on a curve in the track between Boortmeerbeek and Haacht on the line to Leuven, the train was stopped by three young men: a doctor, Youra Livchitz, and his two friends, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon. They had one small pistol, a lantern covered with red paper to imitate a stop signal, and a pair of pliers for cutting wire. They managed to open one wagon. Other deportees, who had prepared to escape beforehand, jumped from the train throughout the night, including after it had moved on. In all, more than 230 people regained their freedom.

Popular descriptions speak of an attack by “partisans”, of “the largest attack on a Holocaust train of the war” and of 236 escapees. This needs some qualification. There were three attackers, and they acted almost on their own, without the backing of a larger organisation. Most of the escapees got out of the wagons by themselves, largely independently of the action at Boortmeerbeek. The number of escapees varies from source to source: the Kazerne Dossin museum and the French literature give 231, other studies 233, and some 236. Roughly half of them survived. Finally, the attack was not unique on the whole continent: it was the only case in Western Europe of the resistance stopping a deportation train, but a month later, on the night of 19–20 May 1943, the Polish underground attacked near Celestynów (PL) a transport of prisoners from Warsaw to Auschwitz. The escape from the twentieth transport was, however, the largest mass escape from a train bound for an extermination camp.

Deportations from Belgium

According to the most common estimates, between 65,000 and 75,000 Jews lived in Belgium before the war, most of them recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and Germany, concentrated in Antwerp and Brussels. Few of them held Belgian citizenship. After Belgium’s capitulation in May 1940 the country was ruled by the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen. It introduced one regulation after another: the registration of Jews, expropriation, bans on practising professions, and finally, in June 1942, the obligation to wear the yellow star.

The deportations were planned by Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish affairs department of the Reich Security Main Office, and in Belgium they were carried out by the Security Police (Sipo-SD). An assembly camp (SS-Sammellager) was set up in the former General Dossin barracks in Mechelen, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. The first transport left there for Auschwitz on 4 August 1942. In the autumn of 1942 trains departed every few days, and the Germans carried out round-ups in the streets and homes of Antwerp and Brussels. Every deportee received a transport number and his or her own number on the list; Simon Gronowski, one of the escapees of April 1943, wore a tag round his neck reading “XX-1234”.

By the end of October 1942 seventeen transports had left Mechelen, carrying away almost 17,000 people. After that the pace slowed: two more trains departed in January 1943, and the next only in April, because most of the Jews still left in Belgium had managed to go into hiding. They were helped by the underground Committee for the Defence of Jews (Comité de défense des Juifs), linked to the Independence Front (Front de l’Indépendance), one of the main organisations of the Belgian resistance, which obtained forged papers, ration cards and hiding places, especially for children. The committee also published underground papers and gave warning of round-ups. News of what was happening to the deportees in the east had been reaching Belgium since the autumn of 1942, and in December the Allied declaration of 17 December confirmed that Jews from all over occupied Europe were being transported to Poland and murdered there.

The three friends’ plan

The idea of stopping a train arose in the Committee for the Defence of Jews. Its activists, among them Hertz Jospa, considered it at the beginning of 1943, but the committee had neither the weapons nor the men for such an operation, and it also feared reprisals. According to Belgian studies, Youra Livchitz – born in 1917 to Russian-Jewish émigrés and a newly qualified medical graduate of the Free University of Brussels – tried to persuade the armed groups of the underground to take part. They refused, considering the plan too risky. Livchitz decided to act alone with two friends who were not Jewish: the twenty-one-year-old Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon, who was Livchitz’s own age. A 6.35 mm Browning pistol with a few rounds was handed to them by a courier of the clandestine Groupe G.

The twentieth transport differed from the earlier ones. Until then deportees had been carried in third-class passenger carriages, from which it was easy to jump out of a window, and several hundred people had already escaped from earlier trains. This time, for the first time, goods wagons were used, their windows boarded up or covered with barbed wire. A separate wagon was also attached for nineteen “special” prisoners – members of the resistance and previously recaptured escapees – who had red crosses painted on their backs. The convoy was guarded by an officer and fifteen German policemen (sources differ over their formation: the Schutzpolizei or the Sipo-SD). Among the deportees were people prepared to escape: they had smuggled in tools and small knives, and according to some accounts a prisoner working in the camp office, Eva Fastag, arranged the lists so that members of the underground ended up in the same wagon.

On 19 April the three friends cycled from Brussels towards Boortmeerbeek. On a curve where the train had to slow down, they set up the lantern showing a red light. The driver braked. Maistriau ran to one of the wagons, cut the wire securing the door with the pliers and opened it, calling to the people inside to run. Seventeen people jumped out. The Germans in the wagon at the rear of the train opened fire, Livchitz shot back with his pistol, and in the darkness the escort could not tell how many opponents it faced. After a few minutes the train moved off. The three friends split up and managed to return to Brussels. According to his own account, Maistriau handed out the money he had on him to those he had freed, so that they could get to Brussels.

Most people escaped later, however, on their own. In several wagons the deportees broke out boards, cut holes or opened the doors and jumped from the moving train in the darkness, right up to the German border. They were helped by the driver Albert Dumon, who drove the train on the further section between Tienen and Tongeren. According to his later account, once he understood what was happening he deliberately drove slowly, braking at every level crossing and bend, and near Borgloon he stopped for half an hour on the pretext of a signal. The German guards fired at the escapees from the wagon platforms; Dumon, returning to Tienen with the locomotive alone, saw bodies beside the track.

Eleven-year-old Simon Gronowski jumped from one of the wagons, urged to escape by his mother, who herself stayed on the train. The boy reached a nearby village, where a rural policeman took him to a gendarme, Jean Aerts. Instead of handing him over, Aerts helped him get back to his father, who was in hiding in Brussels. Régine Krochmal, a nurse and member of the underground, cut through the bars of a wagon’s small window with a bread knife and jumped out near Haacht. Both survived the war.

The outcome of the escape

According to the findings of Belgian historians, above all Maxime Steinberg, 231 people escaped from the twentieth transport (other studies give 233 or 236). Twenty-odd of them were killed by the escort’s bullets or in jumping from the train. About 90 were caught by the Germans in the following days and weeks and deported on later transports. Depending on the source, between 113 and 118 escapees remained free and lived to see the liberation. Many of them were afterwards hidden by Belgian inhabitants of the surrounding villages and by activists of the Committee for the Defence of Jews.

The train reached Auschwitz on 22 April. At the selection 521 people – 276 men and 245 women – were registered as camp prisoners. The rest, more than 870 people, children among them, were murdered the same day in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Of those registered, about 150 survived the war, according to figures from the Kazerne Dossin museum. Among those murdered was Simon Gronowski’s mother; his elder sister Ita, who as a Belgian citizen had remained in Mechelen, died in Auschwitz after being deported in September 1943.

The Germans drew their conclusions from the escape. From the twentieth transport onwards, all trains from Mechelen were made up of closed goods wagons and the escort was reinforced: from then on a police company guarded the convoys as far as the Reich border. No later transport from Belgium was ever stopped.

The fate of the three friends

Youra Livchitz was arrested a few weeks after the action. He managed to escape from Gestapo headquarters in Brussels, but in June 1943 he was caught again together with his brother Alexandre, also a member of the underground. Both were shot in February 1944, Youra on 17 February at the rifle range in Schaerbeek. Jean Franklemon was sent in August 1943 to Fort Breendonk and then, as a “Nacht und Nebel” prisoner, to camps in the Reich, finally Sachsenhausen; he survived. Robert Maistriau hid in the Ardennes and fought with the partisans; in March 1944 he was arrested and passed through Breendonk, Buchenwald and the subcamps of Mittelbau-Dora until he was liberated by the British in Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. He died in 2008.

Its place in the history of the war

The action at Boortmeerbeek did not stop the deportations from Belgium. By the summer of 1944 twenty-eight transports had left Mechelen, carrying 25,257 Jews and 351 Roma. Of these, just over a thousand survived the war. At the same time, according to estimates, more than 20,000 Jews, including several thousand children, survived the occupation in hiding with the help of neighbours, clergy and the underground, so that more than half of Belgium’s Jews survived the Holocaust. The attack on the twentieth transport became a symbol of the fact that rescue was possible, and that sometimes the courage of a few people was enough to achieve it.

On the same day the ghetto uprising broke out in Warsaw, and British and American diplomats gathered in Bermuda to deliberate on the fate of refugees. The coincidence of dates underlines how far, in April 1943, the initiative in saving Jews lay with the Jews themselves and a handful of helpers rather than with governments. For a long time the memory of the three friends remained confined to Belgium. In 1993 a memorial to the transports from Mechelen was unveiled at Boortmeerbeek station, and the story of the twentieth convoy was told at length by the German journalist Marion Schreiber in her book Stille Rebellen (2000). Today the Kazerne Dossin museum in the former barracks in Mechelen documents the fate of all those deported from Belgium.