Source: The Guardian (2003) The heroes of Mechelen .
"The whole thing took perhaps half an hour 60 years ago. But Robert Maistriau has never forgotten that moonlit night on a Belgian railway line in April 1943 as he scrambled to open the doors of a cattle truck and urged the terrified Jews inside to get out and run away. Shots rang out from the German guards, but in the confusion 17 prisoners escaped. Later, further down the track, 200 more managed to flee. The unlucky 1,400 left on the train reached their destination: Auschwitz. Few lived to tell the tale.
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Maistriau, now 82, is the last survivor of an extraordinary act of wartime resistance to the Nazis. The train he stopped, with two friends, was the 20th convoy transporting Jews from Belgium to the infamous extermination camp in Poland, where more than a million were gassed. It was a rare red light for genocide.
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Equipped with pliers, a hurricane lamp and a single pistol, the three executed a plan that had been rejected by organised partisan groups as too dangerous. Their improvisation and derring-do owed much to the scout troops where young Belgians, in those pre-TV days, spent much of their spare time. The intrepid trio even made their getaway by bike. But it was no Tin Tin adventure: resistance activity or possession of a gun was routinely punished by death, often after torture. (...)
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The attack on the convoy - by coincidence the same day the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising began - is widely known in Belgium. But it took a German writer, Marion Schreiber, to weave the episode into the wider context of the war, the German military administration, the SS and Hitler's "final solution" in her fascinating book, Silent Rebels.
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Maistriau's baptism of fire could have been any kind of sabotage operation. But three days beforehand his schoolfriend and croquet partner, Youra Livchitz, a Russian-born Jewish doctor, told him of the plan. "He said there would be a train taking Jews to Poland. It's difficult to say now exactly what we knew then. We knew they were badly treated, but we didn't know exactly what was going to happen to them. Livchitz didn't know either." (...)
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Starting in 1942 Belgium's Jews were rounded up and taken to a barracks at Mechelen, dubbed "the ante-chamber of death". From there, meticulously numbered for the SS files - and the historical record - they went straight to Auschwitz. Thousands of others, including children, fled or went into hiding, sheltered by brave non-Jews at enormous risk. (...)
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Maistriau's fate was written in his family. His father was liberal and anti-clerical. His mother's first husband was a French Jew, killed in the Great War. And there were Jewish friends - Livchitz and others - in the scouts and at school. He was bored with his desk job in a metals company, impulsive, and prepared to fight the Germans, still hated for their atrocities in 1914. "I wasn't crazy, but I was very easily carried away," he explains. "And I was ready to take risks."
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Livchitz, slightly older, was a charismatic figure still remembered vividly by contemporaries. He was caught months after the attack and executed as a "communist terrorist", refusing to wear a blindfold as he faced the firing squad. The third member of the group was Jean Franklemon, an art student and communist, who was sent to a concentration camp but lived.
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Bureaucratic efficiency helped reconstruct this terrible story. Train 801 had 30 trucks carrying 1,631 Jews. The oldest deportee, Jacob Blom, number 584, was 90. The youngest, Suzanne Kaminski, number 215, was five weeks. A few, alerted to the escape plan by the resistance, had managed to saw though bars and doors and were ready when the train stopped. Most of the others were too frightened or weak.
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Maistriau describes how he cut the wire securing the door of one truck, shouting "Sortez, sortez," and the wry humour of what followed. "What do you expect us to do now," one anxious woman asked him, looking round in dismay at the dark and trees. "I said: 'Madame. Brussels is that way, Louvain is that way. Sort it out for yourselves. I've done all I can.' But they all made their way safely back to Brussels."
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Emboldened by the raid, other Jews escaped when the train resumed its journey, though some were injured or killed by the fall or the guards' bullets. Simon Gronowski, 11 at the time, still remembers the last words his mother spoke to him in Yiddish as he jumped off: "The train's going too fast." He never saw her again.
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Maistriau continued working with the resistance but was captured in 1944, deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and finally liberated by the Americans. He spent the rest of his working life farming in Congo, staying on after independence.
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Years later he was recognised as a "righteous gentile" by Israel's Yad Vashem holocaust centre for helping persecuted Jews. And there were meetings with survivors or their children at ceremonies commemorating the heroism of that long-ago night. "At one of them," he says, sounding bemused, "a woman came up to me and kissed me, and said: 'You saved my life.'""
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Silent Rebels: The true story of the raid on the 20th train to Auschwitz, by Marion Schreiber, is published by Atlantic Books
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