Did anyone help free prisoners on their way to the death camps during WWII? If so, did any of them successfully escape and survive the war? The answer is “Yes!”
In April 1944, Nazi soldiers herded eleven-year-old Simon Gronowski and his mother onto a waiting train, along with more than sixteen hundred other Jewish prisoners living in Belgium. The Gronowskis crowded into a wooden boxcar with one single, small, wired-over window and no food, water, or seats. The train’s destination was the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland, more than seven hundred miles away.
Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Around 9:30 PM and less than ten minutes after the train left the station, the transport slowed and then stopped. Three members of the Belgian Resistance—Robert Maistriau, Jean Franklemon, and Youra Livchitz—had placed a lantern covered with red paper on the railroad tracks in an effort to stop the train. They wanted to help as many prisoners escape as possible, and their ploy worked. The engineer halted the train for the “danger” signal.
Armed with only a small-caliber handgun, Livchitz attempted to bluff the Nazi guards into thinking a large force was attacking the train. He fired his revolver repeatedly at the rear of the train where the guards were stationed.
Maistriau and Franklemon used wire cutters to open the boxcar doors and yelled at the prisoners to get out. Many jumped off and tried to run away, but the guards on top of the train fired at them. After a few minutes, the train moved forward, but the engineer deliberately accelerated at a slow pace so more prisoners could escape.
After opening as many boxcars as possible, Maistriau, Franklemon, and Livchitz retrieved their bicycles from the bushes and quickly rode away. They had not reached the Gronowskis’s boxcar, but men inside pried open the door. The train had started forward, but some inside jumped out anyway.
Courtesy of Author Jessica Dommicent and Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Simon’s mother gave him money to hide in his sock then led him to the door. She held him by the shoulders outside the car but was reluctant to let go when the train’s speed increased. After the engineer slowed down, the boy’s mother finally released him, and Simon landed on the ground safely. He was the last person to escape his car.
The German guards shot other jumpers, but when Simon spotted the guards heading his way, he rolled down a small slope and ran for the trees. He didn’t stop until he was deep in the woods. Because Simon was a scout and had camped in the Belgian forests, he was quite comfortable in his new surroundings.
The eleven-year-old walked through the night and reached the edge of the woods at daybreak. He stopped at a small house and told the woman who answered that he had lost his way in the woods while playing with friends and needed help getting home to Brussels. The woman took him to the home of a policeman who was also a secret member of the Belgian Resistance.
The policeman was aware of the train ambush and assumed Simon had escaped. The officer’s wife washed and mended Simon’s clothing, fed him breakfast, and gave him a bath. The officer took the boy to a remote train depot and paid for his return to the city. Simon made it safely to Brussels, and, miraculously, no one requested his identification papers along the way.
Simon returned to his former neighborhood where a close family friend, Madame Rouffart, housed and cared for him. She arranged a reunion for Simon with his father, who was in hiding. Fearing they would be captured if they stayed together, Madame Rouffart sent Simon to another safe house where he survived until the Allies liberated Belgium. Sadly, Simon’s mother was sent to the gas chambers as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz, and Simon’s older sister later met the same fate. Simon’s father died of a heart attack shortly after the liberation.
Simon’s train achieved notoriety as the “Twentieth Convoy.” It was the only Nazi train carrying deportees to a death camp that was ambushed by a Resistance group during the Holocaust. Two of the three Resistance members who freed the escapees survived the war. More than two hundred and thirty Jewish prisoners escaped, and more than a hundred were not recaptured. Simon grew up in the home of his aunt and uncle and became an accomplished Belgian attorney, father, and grandfather.
Source: My Brother’s Keeper by Rod Gragg. Center Street, 2016.