THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief The Twentieth Train: The True Story of the Ambush of the Death Train to Auschwitz by Marion Schreiber (Grove, 262 pp., $25). In this fascinating volume, Marion...
...A few of them are still alive today...
...The nuns leaked word of this to the Resistance...
...They had ridden their bicycles to the site, armed with one handgun and a lantern wrapped in red paper to look like a railway signal...
...In this fascinating volume, Marion Schreiber, a German journalist who spent sixteen years working at Der Spiegel, tells the story of two hundred and twenty-five people who were freed from a train carrying them from Belgium to Auschwitz...
...Three men, only one of them a Jew, took upon themselves the quixotic mission of stopping the train and prying its doors open...
...Another amazing story concerns a convent on Rue Clemenceau in Brussels...
...That night, Paul Halter, the twentythree-year-old commander of the partisans, stormed the convent with a few armed men...
...Along the way, Schreiber tells of the escapee who was waiting for the tram back to Brussels, covered with soot and grime from the tracks...
...The ruse worked for a few minutes, and while the Germans were too flustered to respond, thinking themselves waylaid by a sizable force, seventeen people leapt to safety through the one door that the attackers had managed to pull ajar...
...They ordered her to dress the children for a journey the next morning and pack them a lunch...
...New hiding places were found for all the liberated children and they survived the Holocaust...
...In his last letter, he wrote, "Dear Mother, I must say goodbye to you, time is running out...
...She tells of the vicious camp commander setting his dogs on prisoners—and the sadistic pedophile who dressed a five-year-old Jewish boy in a miniature SS uniform and taught him to perform vicious practical jokes on the hapless prisoners...
...The leader of the rescuers, Youra Livchitz, a handsome doctor and charming playboy, was later betrayed by an informant and killed by the military administration...
...Remember me without pain...
...In addition to the 17 who were freed in the initial attack, 231 people later gathered their courage and jumped from the train, of whom 23 were killed—225 survivors out of 248 escapees...
...Other stories are not so inspiring...
...Schreiber takes us on that ride, showing us the stark reality of those few hours rumbling through the countryside...
...They kicked the door in, locked up the Mother Superior, and made a mess...
...Only one in a hundred survived Auschwitz...
...I have had good, excellent comrades until the end, and even now I do not feel alone...
...Schreiber describes, for instance, Baron von Falkhausen, the military governor installed by the Nazis in Belgium, entertaining lavishly in a requisitioned castle with his high-society blonde paramour and turning a blind eye to the nefarious workings of the SS...
...Jay D. Homnick...
...They had to weigh the risks: death from a bad landing or the German guard's machine-gun fire, against the grim prospect of Auschwitz, known to them only via rumor...
...Two young nuns woke the children and dressed them, saying, "Quickly, quickly the white knights want to save you...
...Yet The Twentieth Train is mostly about the men who waylaid the twentieth Belgian train to Auschwitz and the prisoners who were alert enough to seize the opportunity to escape...
...When the Nazis entered the station to look for suspects, all the Belgian laborers wordlessly clustered around the Jew and shielded him from their murderous eyes...
...Even when the train resumed its fateful ride, most of the hatches were worked open from the inside by tools the Resistance had smuggled to the prisoners.Thirteen hundred and fifty people remained in those cars with the chancetojump out...
...Mother Superior Marie-Angele was sheltering twenty-eight Jewish girls in the boarding school, but an informant told the Gestapo...
Vol. 9 • August 2004 • No. 44
