1917–1944
On 19 April 1943, at around 22:00, the twentieth deportation train slowly left the station in Mechelen. More than 1,600 desperate and frightened people, almost all Jews, began their long and grim journey to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. The conditions on board were inhumane: an average of fifty to sixty people were crammed together in cattle wagons, with hardly any room to sit or move. There was hardly any food or drink.
That same evening, three childhood friends gathered on the Meiserplein in Schaarbeek: Youra Livschitz, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon, former pupils of the Ukkel Atheneum and former students at the ULB. During their school days, they had acquired a pronounced liberal and anti-fascist commitment. No fewer than seventeen pupils and teachers from the Atheneum would lose their lives in the resistance during the war, including eight by execution. The recently deceased Andrée Dumon, who played a key role in the Comète escape line, also attended the same institution.
Their nerves were running high: they were about to carry out a seemingly impossible plan. Richard Althenhoff briefly joined them on the Meiserplein. As resistance leader of Group G, he handed Youra a revolver, after which he left again. Armed with the revolver, pliers and a red storm lamp, the three cycled via Steenokkerzeel and Kampenhout to Boortmeerbeek.
There they put their bicycles aside and took up position in a bend where the train was moving more slowly. They placed the storm lamp on the tracks. According to the railway regulations, every train had to stop for a red light, and so it happened. Despite the presence of SS troops, the three managed to break open the seventeenth carriage. In Boortmeerbeek, seventeen prisoners jumped out of the train; most of them returned to Brussels by tram. The excitement and chaos allowed more than 220 people to escape further on, up to the Belgian border—a unique event in Western Europe. Among them was Simon Gronowski, now 93 and still an active witness to the past. Unfortunately, 25 refugees were shot dead on the spot and 91 were arrested again. Ultimately, 121 people managed to escape deportation for good.
A month after this liberation action, Youra Livschitz was arrested by the Gestapo. He managed to escape in spectacular fashion: he overpowered his guard, put on his uniform and left the Gestapo headquarters as if it were his daily work. Together with his brother Alexandre, he planned the flight to England. But they were betrayed: their car was stopped. Alexandre was imprisoned and tortured in Fort Breendonk on 12 January 1944. He was later transferred to the prison of Sint-Gillis and executed in Schaarbeek on 10 February.
Youra also ended up in the ‘Hell of Breendonk’. He was imprisoned there between 26 June 1943 and 17 February 1944, until he too was executed, together with five fellow sufferers.
In the spring of 1944, Rachel Livschitz-Mitchnik read the last letters from her sons Alexandre and Youra. Alexandre wrote that he was going to his death ‘with a scorned head and a clear conscience’. Youra let her know that he would have liked to work alongside her to create a ‘new reality’. It must have been a comfort to her that their surviving comrades continued to visit her for years, until she herself died at the age of 93.
For decades, the liberation of the twentieth convoy remained little more than a footnote in history. Today, it is rightly regarded as one of the most heroic and legendary acts of resistance in Europe. Nowhere else in Western Europe was it possible to stop a deportation train—let alone allow so many people to escape.
Sources:
● Ledenmagazine Helden van het verzet, september 2024
● Marion Schreiber, Rebelles silencieux, Editions Racine, 2002