82 years ago on April 19th 1943, Belgian and Jewish underground movements attacked a transport of Jews from the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium

Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow comrades.

On this day, 82 years ago on April 19th 1943, Belgian and Jewish underground movements attacked a transport of Jews from the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium. 150 Jews were rescued, but 220 died in the process. It was the only resistance effort during the Holocaust that had attacked a transport train.

According to historian Halik Kochanski in their book Resistance, the underground war in Europe 1939–45:

The attack on the train  Convoy XX was carried out by three members of the Belgian resistance, who had received advance information of the train’s intended departure.

Armed with a lone pistol and pliers, they wrapped a storm lantern with red paper and placed it on the track between Mechelen and Leuven, as if it were a warning signal. When the train came to a stop, the three resistance fighters: “Robert Maistrau, Georges Livschitz and Jean Franklemon – were able to pry open the doors to one of the wagons. Five people immediately escaped. (Another account says 17 escaped.)

After the train began moving again, the prisoners within began to use tools that they had hidden in the straw before their departure. With these they opened additional escape routes, and many more began to jump from the moving train.

In total, 231 deportees fled from the train that night. 26 of them were killed during their flight, and another 116 were recaptured, a total of 116 were successful in their escape.

The youngest of those who got away was Simon Gronowski, who was 11 at the time. He was traveling with his mother, Channa (his father was in hiding, and his older sister, Ita, had for the time being been spared deportation), after two months of confinement at the Mechelen camp.

He told reporter Sarah Ehrlich, in a story for the BBC, how he had used the time to prepare for an escape by practicing jumping from the top bunk of his bed. “When the train slowed down, his mother helped him to make his jump from a running board. He wanted to wait for his mother, but the German guards were shooting, so he ran”.

According to Gronowski, once escaped he entered a forest and walked through the night:

“When he arrived in the village of Berlingen, the following morning, he knocked on the door of a house. The family inside turned him over to a Belgian constable, who returned him to safe refuge in Brussels. There he was reunited briefly with his father, and was hidden for the rest of the war by several different families. He never saw his mother or sister again, and his father died in July, 1945”.

According to German figures available at the national archives in Berlin, Convoy XX arrived in Auschwitz on April 22. Of the 1,031 deportees who were still on it, only 521 received ID numbers, meaning that the remainder were presumably sent to their immediate deaths. Of those, 150 are known to have survived the war.

Gronowski, the lone survivor from his family, became a lawyer after the war.