Boortmeerbeek is a modest town on the rail line between Mechelen and Leuven in Belgium. The railway station there is typical of the towns along the line, with a level crossing. Near that railway station there’s a monument. It’s simple. No ostentation at all. The Boortmeerbeek monument tells a poignant story.

Between the summer of 1942 and the fall of the Third Reich in 1944, twenty-eight transport trains left Mechelin, in Northern Belgium, carrying 25,257 Jews and 351 gypsies to eastern Europe. For most, the destination was the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp in Poland. By April of 1943, nineteen convoys had made the journey and the occupants had disappeared into the maw of that abhorrent killing machine. But Auschwitz demanded more.

The twentieth transport convoy left the Kazerne Dossin transit camp at Mechelin on April 19, 1943. Destination-the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The welcoming sign over the Auschwitz entrance reads ‘Work makes you free’ Somebody had an unbelievably macabre sense of humour!

Previous convoys had transported their occupants in third-class carriages. With Convoy 20, the gloves came off. It carried 1631 Jewish men, women and children. For the first time the occupants were stuffed into freight wagons with barbed wire covering the gaps.

Salubrious accommodation indeed. They squashed 100 in there.

The last carriage was a Sonderwagen. A special car, containing 19 resistance members and ‘jumpers’ from previous transports, all. marked in the back of their clothes with a red-painted cross, indicating they were destined to be killed upon arrival at Auschwitz.

The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen German security police. Three young members of the Belgian resistance, two students armed only with one pistol between them, a lantern and red paper to create a makeshift red light managed to stop the train near Boortmeerbeek and liberate seventeen occupants. Others subsequently escaped from the convoy between Boortmeerbeek and the death camp. In all, 231 people escaped. 90 were recaptured and put on another convoy, 26 others were killed, and 115 succeeded in escaping, including Simon Gronowski, an eleven-year old boy. Simon survived the war.

Who were the heroes ready to risk their lives by attacking with only a single pistol?

Youra Livchitz was a Jewish doctor. His companions were non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon.

Livchitz, Maistriau and Franklemon From the website of Marc Michiels.

Livschitz was captured later and executed. His companions survived the war Franklemon was arrested soon after the attack and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was freed in May 1945. Robert Maistriau was arrested in March 1944. He was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and lived until 2008.

The Nazis were nothing if not efficient and the paper trail was preserved at Kazerne Dossin and Auschwitz itself, allowing historians to trace the deportees. The figures are staggering, when you take a moment to consider that each was a person with a family and loved ones. The paper trail shows that of 70,000 Jews were living in Belgium. Of these, 37,000 were deported either through Mechelen transit camp or the Drancy internment camp near Paris.

The Boortmeerbeek breakout was the only large-scale escape from a holocaust train.

On April 22, 1943, the Convoy 20 train arrived at Auschwitz. Only 521 ID numbers were assigned. Of these 521, only 150 people survived the war. The remainder escaped or disappeared in the Holocaust. Subsequent convoys were manned by a German reserve company, preventing mass escapes.

A statue in remembrance of the holocaust and the action of the resistance was installed near the train station of Boortmeerbeek in 1993. It records the transport of 25,257 Jews including 5,093 children and 352 Gypsies on 28 holocaust trains from Mechelen to the concentration camps. Only 1,205 persons returned home alive. Sobering figures indeed!

Man’s capacity for inhumanity is incomprehensible for most of us. I’d heard of the holocaust of course, but I’d never heard of Convoy 20 until I came across the story while researching for Souvenirs and I confess to have been shaken by the disturbing stories I read. I felt obliged to incorporate the Convoy 20 story into Souvenirs as a way to pay homage to the almost forgotten heroes of the mass breakout at Boortmeerbeek.

Convoy 20-Escaping Auschwitz

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