Holocaust victim

Youra Livschitz, Jean Frankelmon and Robert Maistriau, three young Belgian resistance fighters, accomplished something unprecedented on April 19, 1943. On that day a train left Mechelen, Belgium, carrying 1,631 Jewish deportees, including 262 children, to an extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The three men armed with shears, a red lantern and a pistol, managed to stop the convoy about 20 km from Mechelen, near a forest, covering the lantern with a red silk cloth so that the engineer thought there was some kind of danger on the railway. At that point, as the train stopped, they cut the wires and locks securing the sliding doors of several wagons. Unfortunately, they were unable to free all the doors, as the squad of soldiers escorting the convoy soon opened fire. Nevertheless, between those who escaped at that moment, and those who escaped when the train restarted its march, there were about 233 Jews, of whom 118 survived the flight (26 died in the attempt, and 89 were recaptured).

Many of the escapees were left at the mercy of the local population. But the Belgians didn’t denounce any of the escaped Jews.

Things did not go so well for Livchitz and Franklemon, both of whom were betrayed and arrested later that year. Livchitz was executed in 1944. Before he was finally captured, Livchitz staged another bravura display, managing to escape from Gestapo headquarters after hours of torture: he outwitted his guard, put on a Nazi uniform and calmly exited the building. Jean Frankelmon was arrested soon after and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was liberated in May 1945. He died in 1977. Robert Maistriau was arrested in March 1944. Released from Bergen-Belsen in 1945, he died in 2008.

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