On this day in 1943, for the only time anywhere in Europe during the Holocaust, members of the Belgian resistance attacked a train carrying Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz and freed many of those being shipped to the gas chanmbers.
That night, the eve of Passover, and the same night the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, three young Belgians cycled out of Brussels towards a railway bend near Boortmeerbeek, between Mechelen and Leuven.
Unique in history of the Holocaust
They carried wire cutters, a storm lantern, some red tissue paper, and a single small-calibre pistol.
What they did next was unique in the history of the Holocaust.
The Twentieth Convoy had left the Dossin barracks in Mechelen that evening carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women and children, the largest transport yet dispatched from Belgian soil to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For the first time, the Nazis had replaced the usual third-class carriages with sealed cattle wagons, their small windows strung with barbed wire. A 40-strong Schutzpolizei escort had been assigned.
The changes were not accidental: earlier convoys had been haemorrhaging prisoners through windows and doors. The machinery of extermination was adapting.
Youra Livchitz, one of the leaders of Group-G, had obtained a 6.35mm pistol and recruited his old schoolmates Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon.
Stopped the train
Livchitz was a Jewish doctor, barred by the Nazis from practising medicine. Maistriau had bought pincers and a Feuerhand lamp, wrapping it in red tissue to make a signal light. Armed with one pistol, a lantern and red paper, the three stopped the train on the Mechelen–Leuven track.
When the driver saw the red signal, he braked. In the darkness and confusion, Maistriau prised open a wagon door. Prisoners began to jump. The guards opened fire.
Livchitz, wounded, fired back to cover the escaping prisoners.
Gunpoint
Franklemon, threatened at gunpoint near the locomotive, could not reach a wagon. Yet by the time the train crossed the German border, 233 people had managed to escape, of whom 118 ultimately survived the war.
The train arrived at Auschwitz on 22 April. Of those who remained, 521 were assigned as slave labourers; the rest were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. Only 150 of the 521 survived the war.
The fate of the three resisters was bleak but defiant. Livchitz was arrested within weeks. He escaped from Gestapo headquarters in Brussels but was recaptured and executed by firing squad in Schaerbeek on 17 February 1944.
His last letter to his mother read: “Consider that I died at the front line.”
Franklemon survived Sachsenhausen. Maistriau survived Bergen-Belsen and lived until 2008.
The attack on the Twentieth Convoy remains the only mass breakout from a Holocaust deportation train in the history of the war.
Three brave anti-nazis, 118 lives saved.
