“I was condemned to death for being Jewish. So what was I risking by working against the Germans?”, nurse Régine Krochmal laughed at an observation about how brave she was to work with the resistance during the Second World War, even though many other Belgians sided with the Nazis. Her struggle led her to the transit camp in Mechelen, Belgium, in January 1943, and her life should have ended in Auschwitz. She was one of the 1,631 Jews and Roma who were crammed into cattle wagons on 19 April 1943 and transported to their deaths in the 20th transport. But that was the first and last time during the Second World War that someone stopped the train and allowed the prisoners to escape. And no, it was not the Belgian partisans. It was three young men, together armed with a single pistol, a petrol bomb and three pairs of pliers, but also with three big hearts.
The night before 19 April 1943, Régine Krochmal slept. She was as torn by uncertainty as the other prisoners in Dossin barracks, which the Germans had converted into a kind of death waiting room. Some had only just arrived, others had been trembling for months, wondering when enough of them would arrive to make it worth the Germans’ while to fill another train for Poland.
Nobody knew what was waiting for them there. Going to a labour camp was the talk among the prisoners before they started to be crammed into cattle wagons with sliding wooden doors and small windows in the roof to let the air in. The railway tracks conveniently ran alongside the barracks and the prisoners did not have to walk far.
In the carriages there was straw, a broom and a bucket instead of a toilet. No one told them where to empty it, although it was clear to everyone that it would fill up quickly on the two- or three-day journey. Between 50 and 60 people were crammed into each wagon.
Régine Krochmal was pushed to the back. It was a hospital one, with a big red cross in the middle. She and a young doctor would have to care for the sick and dying on the way. “The fear was almost palpable,” she later recalled of that day. “We didn’t know what to expect. Would it get better there? Maybe we really were going to a labour camp. Or will it be worse there?”
It was already bad at Dossin Barracks. The living conditions were camp-like, but even if they hadn’t been, Régine would have followed the basic principle of the Resistance: take every opportunity to escape, no matter how small. In the barracks, she heard rumours that the Resistance was going to attack the train, and this only strengthened her resolve to jump off.
She was at her carriage when Fritz Basch, a doctor, grabbed her arm. He didn’t look at her, but said quietly, as if giving her final instructions for the care of the sick. Cut the bars. Make sure you escape. When you get to Auschwitz with the patients, you will be gassed and burned!” He thrust a large knife into her hand and she hurriedly hid it under her dressing gown.
She heard every word he said, but she couldn’t believe any of it could be true. He spoke in metaphors, she concluded, and used them to describe the horrible conditions of life that await us at the finish line. I must escape. But how? What could I cut through?
At the ceiling, she saw a ventilation window closed with a wooden shutter. She took a knife and set to work. A young doctor stopped her. What the hell is going on? They’ll kill everyone for her! To make it easier to control the people, the Germans threatened everyone before boarding the 801 train that if even one of them escaped, they would be shot. On top of that, they appointed a prisoner in each carriage, responsible for ensuring that as many campers arrived at their destination as left Mechelen. If one was missing, he would pay for the mistake with his life.
But Régine didn’t let it stop her. She did not question her decision even when the young man started lecturing her that a doctor’s duty is to help the sick, not to run away from them. “We are at war,” she interrupted him, trying to convince him that things work differently in wartime. As a member of the resistance movement, she ordered him to run away with her, but he smoothly refused.
Idealist that he was, he took her hand. “I hit him. Not with a knife, with my hand.” She shook him so hard that he preferred to stay away from her as she began to cut the pine wood from which the shutter was made. Fortunately, because later Régine Krochmal didn’t know what she would have done if he had tried to stop her again.
But she had already finished her work when she noticed the train slowing down. She pulled herself up, climbed out of the window and jumped. She landed on the ground just as the train stopped. She heard shouting and gunfire.
She was lying with her face to the ground. She stuffed some soil in her mouth. She was sure she was going to be hit. She did not want to risk crying or getting up at that moment. The soil in her mouth should have prevented that.
“I was losing track of time. I lay motionless, almost not daring to breathe. Minutes passed like hours. Suddenly, the train started moving again,” she later recalled.
She stood up carefully. The knife was still in her hand. She started walking and soon came to a small police station. She explained openly to the policeman what had happened. He put his finger in front of her mouth and told her to be quiet.
“He took me by the arm and led me to the meadow directly behind the station. There were two haystacks. He pushed me into one and covered me with hay. Then he hurriedly returned to the house.” Régine heard German dogs.
The policeman served the Germans a drink and assured them that he had seen nothing unusual. But they were in no hurry. They stood around, drinking, smoking and chatting. Just as they were picking themselves up, the policeman came up to them. He prepared something to eat and directed her towards the bus stop, about 20 minutes’ walk away. From there, he told her, she would easily get to Busel, and it was from Brussels that the unusual trio that had made it so easy for Régine Krochmal to escape was coming.
Trinity against the German train
At the beginning of 1943, Robert Maistriau was more of a bored 22-year-old young man, interrupted from his medical studies and bored at his desk, than an active Resistance fighter. But he was certainly Youra Livschitz, a 25-year-old Jewish doctor who, together with his older brother Alexander, better known as Choura, was constantly resisting the Germans.
At the beginning of 1943, he called Robert Maistriau, a friend from cricket. He wanted to attack a transport with Jews, he explained. The Nazis had been transporting them from Dossin barracks to Auschwitz since 4 August 1942. “If you’re up for it, it would be wonderful to organise something like that, to stop the train and free the prisoners…” he told him.
Robert was all for it before he even thought about what he was getting into. He has never been indifferent to crimes against the Jews. A French Jew was his mother’s first husband, and many of his friends were of the Jewish faith. “I wasn’t crazy, but I was easily carried away. And I was never afraid of taking risks”, he later recalled his impulsive temper in the days when he knew that the Germans were taking Jews, communists and Nazi opponents to the camps, but not killing them.
Youra Livschitz did not believe this either. He only wanted to make life miserable for the Germans when he decided to stop their train 801, open the carriage doors and let the people escape.
To the Belgian partisans, this seemed crazy. It is true that they had already lifted several sections of railway lines into the air, but no one had ever stopped a German train, and probably for good reason. It was simply too dangerous. One of the partisan leaders told Livschitz nicely that he would not risk a few dozen partisan lives to save three Jewish ones.
When he said three, he meant a handful, Youra Livschitz meant literally three, when a little later he talked about how many people would be involved in his venture. And so, in the middle of April 1943, the phone rang again at Robert Maistriau’s. Are you still in favour, Livschitz wondered. Of course, Robert immediately replied.
Livschitz instructed him to buy three pairs of pliers and an oil lamp, and to bring red paper to the collection point at half past seven in the evening on 19 April. Why red paper? They will use it to wrap the lamp to make it emit red light and place it next to the railway tracks. Under Belgian law, the train must stop before the red light.
The plan will work, Youra Livschitz assured Robert Maistriau, when it seemed far too hasty to be effective. However, Maistriau only learned that it would be carried out by just the three of them when, on the evening of 19 April 1943, he saw 25-year-old Jean Franklemon, Livschitz’s former classmate, standing next to Livschitz.
They didn’t waste time with polite chit-chat. Armed with a single pistol that Youra had got from the resistance, they each got on their bikes and set off from Brussels towards Haacht.
The train was planned to stop between Boortmeerbeek and Haacht, where the proximity of the forest would protect the refugees from Nazi pursuers. At fifteen minutes to ten in the evening, they were lined up along the line: Youra Livschitz stood where the train was supposed to stop, Robert Maistriau in the middle and Jean Franklemon where the last carriage should have been. The lamp was already standing by the track, not far round the bend.
“We heard the whistle of the locomotive. The sounds echoed through the silent night… just a few seconds later, the train was rushing towards the lamp. But it was at the end of the curve by the tracks, so the driver noticed the signal at the last moment.” He started to brake and passed the lamp post, but stopped anyway.
“It was dark. Suddenly I saw a red light. It was clear to me that it was not a sign of the railway, but I stopped anyway,” explained driver August Buvens later. If he had not been so afraid of ending up among the prisoners himself, he assured us, he would never have driven Jews to their deaths, and so he had to.
He remembered that as soon as he stopped, he heard lightning coming from the woods, while Robert Maistriau’s only memory is of an eerie silence, unbroken by anything but the sound of engines. He did not know where his companions were.
He stood frozen in place, though it must have been no more than a few seconds before he ran to the nearest carriage. His eyes casually glanced around the German soldiers. He was filled with fear. He quickly reached for the lock on the door. It was time-consuming work. He was only cutting with one hand, because he was holding a torch in the other, and that beam of light made him the most conspicuous point for miles around.
“I’ve finally made it.” He opened the heavy sliding door and shouted to the shocked people inside to jump. “Schnell, schnell, fliehen Sie!” he urged them in broken German to hurry up and escape. To his surprise, they hesitated.
I did what I could
It was not so easy to escape. Before they got on the train, the Germans threatened to kill them all if just one escaped. They were scared to death and morally conflicted: should they save themselves and endanger those who would be left behind? Dare they put their own family members in danger? If not before, the Germans will realise at the finish line that some people are missing.
Claire Prowizur faced a particularly painful choice. Should she stay with her seriously ill and unconscious father or jump off the train with her husband? Her decision to at least try to save her own life was made even more difficult by the prisoner in charge of order in the carriage, who did everything he could to keep people where they were.
In “his” carriage, Robert Maistriau was confronted by a tall woman who firmly forbade his fellow passengers to enter through the open carriage door. Two of the women jumped in anyway. A few men followed them. And then a few more people. In the end, 17 of them escaped.
But Robert Maistriau didn’t know that. While the Germans were firing frantically all around, he moved to the other carriage and started working on its lock. Before he could shoot it, the train had already pulled out.
August Buvens, the engine driver, hid in a coal shed from the heavy gunfire. He didn’t stay there long. Soon, an officer and two soldiers were standing in front of him. He had to get into the locomotive with them. Why had he stopped the train? Because he saw a red light. What was it? An ordinary red light, and by law you have to stop at a red light. He had to take the officer to the place where he saw the light, but the shooting increased again and they went back.
Buvens had to restart the train. “I started the engine. We were going fast, as if we were walking.” The Germans were worried that the rebels had also blown up the tracks, but when everything appeared to be in place, he accelerated again.
He did not find out what had happened on the train until the next day, but it never reached his ears that Robert Maistriau had that night distributed the money Livschitz had given him to “his” refugees before they left Brussels.
Each fugitive was given 50 francs, and he explained that he could do nothing more for them. He showed them which way was Brussels, which was Mechelen and which was Leuven, then told them to disperse. “They left in a group,” he laughed later.
Sam met Jean Franklemon where the bike had been left. He had not seen him all evening. The art student immediately apologised to him. He tried to open the carriage door at the end of the train, but was confronted by guards and barely got away with his skin when he was shot. He dared not go back.
Livschitz was nowhere to be found, so the pair started their bikes, returned to Brussels, had a coffee together and parted ways. They never saw each other again, although they both remained Resistance fighters, experienced the life of a concentration camp and survived the war.
But Robert met Youra Livschitz again. It was then that he learned that Youra had encountered the guards immediately after the train had stopped. After they had fired a little at each other, he managed to escape and walked all night back to Brussels.
The Germans arrested him a month later, but he managed to escape, and a few months after that he was no longer able to escape. His brother Choura was also behind bars. Both were sentenced to death. The elder brother was executed first, followed shortly after by Youra. He refused to be blindfolded when they shot at him in the courtyard.
“They died like heroes,” the Belgian guard said to the girl, Youra Livschitz, as he handed over the boy’s letter for his mother, who had lost both her sons at almost the same time.
Jump from a runaway train
Decades later, people still remember Youra Livschitz’s charisma and determination. Isabelle Weinreb Castegnier never felt them because she never met her husband, but she was on the train that Youra stopped. In her carriage she heard shouting and moaning, but her door remained firmly closed. Then the train started moving again. No, it must not be over!
The prisoners dragged out the tools they had smuggled into the wagon and started working on the door. Twenty-four-year-old Isabelle waited impatiently for the events to unfold. She was three months pregnant with her husband, a Belgian Christian.
She thought that marriage would save her from deportation, so she did not think of going into hiding, as so many other Belgian Jews did. In the end, the Nazis arrested her on her wedding day, together with her husband and all her in-laws.
The man was released by his family after only a few days, and even such good relations with the Nazis were not good enough to get the Jewish Isabelle out of Dossin barracks. The camp commander explained to her nicely that her husband was a fool if he thought he could save her.
When she heard that she and her unborn child were facing certain death, she immediately joined the prisoners planning their escape. Most of them were counting on jumping off the train, because the carriages on transport 19 were passenger cars.
Isabelle and her friend Lilly Wolkenfeld started organising “jumping classes”. They would go down from the highest platform to the floor to learn how to jump, even though they knew that jumping from a moving train was much harder than jumping from a bed to the floor. The youngest participant in their courses was “le petit Simon” or little Simon, aged 11.
On 19 April 1943, when the Jewish Easter and the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising coincidentally began, they were “ready”. Since they had almost consecutive camp numbers, they were crammed into the same wagon, and inside they followed the plan exactly: they were stripped until the doors were opened. Now all that was left was to jump. But the real jump from the moving train into the hard darkness was much harder than they had dreamed it would be.
The Germans were shooting everywhere, so the likelihood of a prisoner being shot was high. The train was moving quite fast, so the escaped prisoner could expect to be at least injured, if not killed, on impact. He also had to be careful not to jump just as another train was approaching.
But he wasn’t safe even when he successfully made the jump. He didn’t know where he was or which way to go. He could not know who he could trust and who he could not trust, especially in Belgium, where people were still too happy to collaborate with the Nazis. If he managed to hide some jewellery or money before he left, he could bribe someone into silence or even help him, but otherwise he was dependent on the goodwill of strangers who mostly saw him as a Jew and an enemy.
This is why prisoners usually jumped off the train before crossing the border. They had a better chance of survival on home soil than they would have had on foreign soil, when they would have betrayed themselves just by not knowing the language. But even if they managed to get home, they had to quickly arrange for false documents or hide until the end of the war.
Not knowing what awaited them at the finish line, it seemed to many that they would only be exchanging one captivity for another by jumping, and it was pointless to risk their lives for that.
Isabelle Weinreb and Lilly Wolkenfeld are Mrs. When the boys managed to open the door, they first “dressed” the broom in men’s clothes and put a hat on it, then waved it around to see whether the Germans were on to them or not. When they heard no shots, they started jumping.
It was Isabelle’s turn. It was pitch dark outside, the train was moving faster and faster. Fear paralysed her body. She could not move. She tried to collect herself when she felt someone pressing on her back. She summoned the last atoms of courage and jumped.
It rolled into a ravine and crawled into the nearby bushes. She twisted her wrist, scratched her face and legs, but was not seriously injured. She had no way of knowing at the time how the jump would affect her pregnancy.
Now it was her friend Lilly Wolkenfleld’s turn, but before she could jump, she had to take care of her Belgian friend Lillian. She didn’t want to practice jumping in captivity because she couldn’t really do it. “I don’t care, you’re going to jump!” said Lilly. It was a matter of life and death. Isabelle had already jumped, and many others had too, but Lillian was still resisting: “No, I can’t!”
The train was now travelling at about 95 kilometres per hour. The faster it was, the stronger the fear. Lillian couldn’t find the strength, but her friend pushed her off the train and jumped in after her.
By then, the Germans already knew something was happening. They shot and hit Lilly, but she “didn’t realise it until later, I had no idea I had a bullet in me at the time”.
Sixty years after the end of the war, she met Marie and Gunther Mendel in America. They easily found a common theme: how we jumped from the train to freedom. Marie and Gunther met in Dossin barracks, shared a carriage on that April night and one by one jumped out of it into a life together.
Isabelle Weinreb also had a new life. When dawn broke, she took public transport back home. Her husband had arranged for false identity documents and insisted to the authorities that he had a new wife because his previous one had died. Six months after the jump, a healthy daughter was born to the couple.
The train is going too fast
And Louis de Groot’s carriage was full of children and old people. When a trio unknown to him stopped the train and he and his brother Albert heard gunshots, they decided to escape. They removed the shutter without being disturbed. The guard in that carriage was Louis himself.
Albert was the first to climb on the outside of the carriage. He stood on the podium and was about to jump. No, we will wait until the Germans stop shooting, Louis stopped him. We will, we won’t, because Louis was determined that the little girl and the little boy should go with them. The other children were too small to help them.
So they stood on the step, holding onto the pole, waiting for the right moment. They reached the hill. The train slowed down a little, and the forest spread out before them. “We’ll all jump together,” Louis decided, clutching the little girl in his arms. At his signal, they pushed off and landed on the hard ground. The girl scratched herself and bled a little, but was not seriously hurt. The two boys were also well.
Simon Gronowski, or “Little Simon” as Isabelle and Lilly called him at Dossin Barracks, also escaped unhurt. He was there for a month before he was put on a train with his mother and his sister Ito was left behind bars.
The Gronowskis were foreigners, and under the laws of the time, the children of foreigners could not acquire Belgian nationality simply because they were born in Belgium. They had to apply for it when they turned 16. Ita did so and got it. As Belgian Jews were not yet deported at that time, she stayed in Dossin and Simon and his mother took the train to Auschwitz.
“We didn’t know we were condemned to death. We thought we had to go because we were going to a labour camp. If someone had told us that we would die in three days, we would not have believed them,” Simon later recalled.
That 19 April 1943 was particularly stressful for him. “Suddenly she woke me up. The train was moving, but the doors were open.” He felt the fresh air rush through the carriage. There was no doubt that he was going to jump. There were two people in front of him, maybe three, and then him, aged 11.
He sat on the edge of the carriage. His mother was holding his clothes on her shoulders. Slowly, she lowered him onto the step so that he stood on it. He held on to the metal pole. He did not dare to jump. “The train is going too fast,” he heard his mother say in Yiddish. After a while it slowed down a little and Simon jumped.
I know everything!
He landed safely and waited for his mother. It was obvious that she would jump right after him, but before she could, the train had already stopped. They arrived at the station. Simon saw German soldiers marching towards him. He wanted to go back to his mother, to hide from them in the carriage, but to get there he would have to pass them.
Without thinking, he hurried down the embankment. Immediately afterwards, he heard German voices above him. The soldiers neither saw nor heard him. When they had gone, he started to run, and he ran all night without knowing where he was going.
Towards morning, he saw a signpost with the name of the town: Kuttekoven. At around 6.30am, muddy and tired, he pressed the unfamiliar bell. The house seemed modest and working-class, but the Nazis, he knew, preferred to occupy the chosen ones.
But he trusted no one. He explained to the housekeeper who opened the door that he had been playing with the children and got lost, and now he wanted to go back to his father in Brussels. The landlady probably did not believe that he was 80 kilometres away from home in the early hours of the morning because he had got lost while playing with his peers, but she nevertheless went to her neighbour, a village policeman, and told him to take care of the ‘lost’ child.
The policeman put him on his bike and they rode to the police station. There, the boy saw Gendarme Jean Aerts and his gun. That was when the horror really took hold of him. He was sure he was going to be taken to the Gestapo. From 1 September 1942, when he went into hiding with his parents and sister, he learned far too much about the Nazis for his age.
And so now, at the age of 11, he kept repeating endlessly that he had played and lost. Gendarme Jean Aerts did not believe him. He handed him over to his wife and drove off. When he returned, he saw terror and fear in the boy’s eyes. Then Simon heard him say, “I know everything. You were on the train with Judi. You ran away. You have nothing to be afraid of. I am a good Belgian. I will protect you.” Now the boy could only “fall into his arms. I cried and told him all about his mother.”
Jean Aerts risked the lives of his three children and his wife for Simon. His wife bathed him, fed him and dressed him in her son’s clothes. Beautifully groomed, Aerts sent his friend to Brussels.
The same evening, Simon saw his father again. He had not been arrested by the Nazis when his family was taken away because he was in hospital. His wife insisted that she was a widow, but before the Gestapo could lie to her, her husband had already been taken from the hospital and hidden by his friends. Now they were hiding his son, but separately from his father.
On 4 September 1944, the Belgians finally breathed free, but Simon’s father was increasingly on the ground. Until then, he had clung to the hope that his wife and daughter would return home, but now he learned that Ita had landed on the 22nd transport, which also carried Belgian Jews to their deaths, and details of the concentration camps.
He realised that his hope had been in vain. He could not live for Simon and himself. In July 1945, he died broken. Simon was left alone. The last words of his mother echoed in his head: “The train is going too fast.”
Between 4 August 1942 and 31 July 1943, 28 trains with a total of 25,484 Jews and 351 Roma left Mechelen for Auschwitz. 1 218 Jews and 33 Roma survived.
Willy Berler, one of those who had the chance to escape on train 801 but did not have the courage to do so, also returned home. At first he thought he was going to jump, when two young prisoners were relentlessly smashing the window shutter and finally opened the window. Anyone with them? Me, volunteered the then 25-year-old Willy. In the end, there were seven candidates in line to jump. Willy was the last one.
He pulled himself up towards the opening, looked through it and instead of crawling to the outside, he lay still as if buried. He saw a boy jumping in front of him. Or he should have, because his clothes were caught, his head was caught between the two carriages and burst like a melon.
Willy saw a dead body for the first time in her life. He couldn’t have jumped. He started to convince himself that he didn’t have to. He was just going to a labour camp. He’s young and strong, he’ll make it. He did survive, but “I would have jumped for sure if I had known what was waiting for me”.
Survive, at any cost
Of the 1,631 prisoners in the 20th transport, 236 attempted to escape. 120 succeeded, 26 were killed and the rest captured. Ten of them were imprisoned and the others were put on the next train to Auschwitz. Of those who arrived at Auschwitz on the 801 trains, 151 survived.
But it was not only the Belgians, French and Dutch who tried to save their skins by jumping. On 4 December 1945, in a letter in which she misspelled the name of the camp, Itka Radoszynska reported:
“Dear Aunt! I’m sure you want to know how I escaped from the hands of the German murderers … Imagine that the Germans shot my mother, my sister and her children in the cemetery after torturing them. She was scared to death. I hope she is now enjoying heavenly peace … Uncle Moishe and Icchali, together with their families, were taken to Tremblinka, a camp where they were burned alive, dismembered or sent to a gas cell. No one was spared in Tremblinka. All this happened on 22 August 1942.
Three months later, others were taken to Tremblinka. At that time, I had nothing and no one to lose, so I jumped off the wagon. Although the train was moving very fast, the fear of death and the will to live were so strong that I had enough courage and I did not even notice that when I jumped out of the carriage, I dislocated my arm and my leg. Despite the morning cold, I went into the city and later went to Warsaw, where I hid and fought for survival for two years.”
Janett Margolis also jumped while being transported by train from Ternopil, Ukraine, to Belzec camp. One of the deportees smuggled a saw into the carriage.
“When the work was done and the bars were sawed through, each cadid had to step on the shoulders of another to jump. He had to push his legs through the window, then hold on with both hands, and finally with one hand, and then swing hard and jump in the direction the train was going.”
The consequences could have been severe, and Janett was later convinced that she was the only survivor of those who jumped from her carriage. Just before she jumped, she got caught in the barbed wire that covered the window. She screamed and attracted the attention of a guard. He shot towards her and missed. She was stuck on the adjacent track.
“At the same moment I saw a locomotive coming straight towards me. With the last of my strength, I rolled down into the ditch. It all took only a few seconds. I was rescued, but badly injured. I was bleeding from my head and my hands. I plucked out some frozen grass and put it on my wounds. I managed to stop the bleeding. Later, I cleaned the blood off my face and got myself together.”
Bertha Goldwasser was not alone on the train that took her from France to Auschwitz in mid-1942. Her young daughter was with her.
“When I found out where the transport was going, I jumped off the train with my baby in my arms. And, alas, my baby died when I landed on the ground. I was badly injured too, but some French people picked me up. I stayed with them for nine months and recovered,” she later recalled, but her story was flawed and not entirely without holes.
“I said to myself: ‘Sure, I’m going to certain death, but here [by jumping] I might save my life’. I had to pick him up with my own hands, separate the pieces of his body and leave them in the forest.”
Joseph Kutrzeba, from Poland, recalled the crossroads he was in when deciding to jump. He knew that by running away he would endanger his father and mother, who were still at home, but “somewhere in the middle [of the journey] I was determined to jump, even though there were rumours that the Germans were watching the railway tracks every 50 or 100 metres.”
Just before the jump, he and his teammate hesitated for a moment as to which would go first. “Looking back, in less than a second I said it was going to be me, because in a split second I always said I was going to be first … I wanted to be first because survival comes first.” He took the risk and won.
Leo Bretholz, then 21 years old, did it too. On 5 November 1943, he was on his way from Paris to Auschwitz. He and his friend Manfred Silberstein took off their pullovers, wrapped them each around their own bars and pulled them to one side to undo them.
Someone advised them to soak their jumpers in urine to make them stick to the bars better. The bucket was full of it. “I tried not to vomit. I bent down and dipped my sweater in the urine. There were bits of excrement floating in it. I was so humiliated. It was the most disgusting thing I have ever had to do,” Leo later explained.
But it was worth it. He and his friend moved the bars far enough apart to squeeze through. On the outside of the carriage, they first tried to dodge the light from the guards searching the train, but when it rounded a bend, they jumped. They survived and became two of the 764 Jews who, according to research by historian Tania von Fransecky, saved their lives by jumping from the train.
