Qualla: Attack on the Twentieth Convoy

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Madelgarius, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was a paper lantern. They had taken a railway signalman's lamp, fitted a candle behind a sheet of red paper, and placed it on the tracks between Boortmeerbeek and Haacht on the night of 19 April 1943. The German train driver saw the red light, believed it meant danger ahead, and slowed the convoy to a stop. Inside the freight wagons behind him, 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children were being deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz. Three young Belgians stood at the side of the track with one pistol between them. They had come to open the doors. Of the people on that train, more than seven hundred would be murdered within days of arriving at their destination. But for those they freed - and for the principle that someone, somewhere, tried - this remains the only known successful armed attack on a Holocaust train.

Image: Madelgarius | CC BY-SA 3.0

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: The Train

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jessica Dommicent, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the spring of 1943 the deportations from Belgium had been running for nine months. The Dossin barracks in Mechelen had become the gathering point - a sealed transit camp where Jewish families waited for the next convoy east. Between summer 1942 and 1944, twenty-eight transport...

Image: Jessica Dommicent | CC BY-SA 4.0

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: Three Friends

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Youra Livchitz was a Jewish doctor. He had grown up in Brussels, the son of immigrants from the old Russian Empire, and joined the resistance as the deportations began. Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon were his friends from school days - neither Jewish, both willing. They had...

Image: WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: The Driver Who Slowed Down

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Once the wagon was open and word passed through the train, the courage cascaded. People who had pried at the bars for hours now hurled themselves through openings. Albert Dumon, the Belgian railwayman at the controls, did what he could in the only language available to him - he k...

Image: WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: What Auschwitz Did With the Rest

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The train arrived at Auschwitz on 22 April. The selection that followed was unusually brutal even by the standards of that place - the SS appeared to retaliate for the escape by sending almost everyone straight to the gas chambers. Of the 1,398 people who reached Auschwitz alive,...

Image: WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Attack on the Twentieth Convoy: What Happened to Them

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Youra Livchitz was arrested a month after the attack. He overpowered his guard at Gestapo headquarters in Brussels, put on the guard's uniform, and walked out the front door. He was free for less than a month before a roadside check caught him. The Germans shot him at Schaerbeek ...

Image: WO2 at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0