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  Once the Germans had stomped off, Kaper and his closest associates informed the rest of the Sonderkommando of their escape plan. People reacted differently to the news. Some were so hungry that they simply collected their potatoes and crawled onto their bunks, while others were both excited and very scared. It was agreed that they wouldn’t do anything until midnight. Sleep was impossible and most of the Sonderkommandos sat in silence, waiting and thinking. A few were beyond caring and would take no part in the enterprise, perhaps hoping for death to release them from the horrors that they had endured at Babi Yar.

  At midnight, the escape began. Many of the Sonderkommandos were afraid to remove their chains, so beaten down were they by the SS, but Kaper and his associates had no such qualms. ‘I noticed a big pair of pincers – I took them and broke the rivets so that the clamps fell off together with the chains,’ he said.29 Many of the others followed suit, all the time trying to keep the level of noise to a minimum as the SS guard outside never strayed too far from the barracks. The only prisoners that they left in chains were those who were asleep and a few whom they felt they couldn’t fully trust.

  While the prisoners worked to free each other, Volodya Kuklya moved over to the door and peered out through the small barred window. He could see a German sentry standing several feet away, his back to the barrack. It was deathly quiet. Gingerly, Kuklya reached one arm through the window and, pushing his white face against the bars, he tried to push Kaper’s key into the heavy padlock. It was very difficult, and Kuklya’s body trembled from the effort and concentration as he stood on tiptoes pressed against the back of the barrack door. Suddenly, his hand slipped and the padlock banged loudly against the door. The German sentry turned almost immediately, attracted by the sound, just as Kuklya whipped his arm inside. Seconds later, the German’s torch illuminated the door as he checked that the lock was still fastened. Backing away from the door, Kuklya tripped over the potato pots with an almighty crash. ‘What’s the matter in the barracks?’ yelled the German sentry, who by now had been joined by one of his comrades. One of the more quick-thinking Sonderkommandos shouted back that they were fighting over potatoes. The Germans laughed coldly. One of them called out to another guard patrolling along the tops of the dugouts: ‘They are fighting over potatoes, not knowing that tomorrow they will need nothing.’30 There followed more contemptuous laughter from the Germans before the guards returned to their normal locations and a hush once more descended over everything.

  It was decided to wait until after the changing of the guard before trying again. The prisoners listened as the guards chatted outside during changeover, until after a while the silence returned. Kuklya once again stepped up to the door and began the process of trying to undo the padlock. This time, he managed to insert the key without any problems and turned it. After some fiddling, Kuklya removed the key from the lock, leaving the padlock hanging open. It was now or never. Gathering what weapons they could from inside the barrack, the prisoners prepared to fight.

  Everyone who was going moved up to the door. Philip Vilkes reached through the window and unhitched the open padlock, letting it fall to the ground. He turned and yelled: ‘Run for your lives, comrades!’ There was a roar from the Sonderkommandos before the door was wrenched open and the filthy, desperately thin, shaven-headed prisoners surged outside. ‘In those half-naked men who reeked of putrefying flesh, whose bodies were eaten by scabies and covered with a layer of mud and soot, and of whose physical strength so little remained, there survived a spirit that defied everything that the Nazis’ New Order had done or could do to them.’31

  The Germans on guard duty near the barracks barely had time to turn when they were brutally beaten and stabbed to the ground as the hundreds of desperate Jews ran on. An SS man in a wooden watchtower that overlooked the barracks quickly brought his machine gun into action, firing bursts towards the doors of the barracks and into the crowd of shouting and screaming Sonderkommandos. Many were cut down by the hail of fire, but enough survived to start streaming off in several directions away from the camp. Many headed into the Babi Yar Ravine, while others climbed up towards a nearby highway.

  The SS reacted with typical speed and homicidal determination. Within minutes, officers were directing hunter-killer teams in pursuit of the fleeing prisoners, some in Kubelwagen field cars or motorcycle combinations. The camp’s dog unit followed other prisoners, its Alsatians snarling and barking on straining leads. The SS immediately executed any Jew that they encountered. Yakov Kaper and a small group managed to keep going through the remaining hours of darkness, with the SS hot on their heels. ‘At dawn as the shooting continued, one could hear cries, cursing and the barking of dogs in the distance,’ he said.32

  Hundreds had escaped from Syrets, but only fifteen Sonderkommandos survived the resulting manhunt. The SS executed 311.

  Very different fates awaited the men who conceived of the monstrous horrors of Babi Yar and Syrets. Syrets Commandant SS-Sturmbannführer Radomski’s days of killing were not yet over. After supervising the execution of the surviving Sonderkommandos at Syrets, Radomski was transferred to Greece, where the ‘Final Solution’ had already been extended and implemented with frightening efficiency. Appointed commandant of Haidari Concentration Camp just outside Athens, Radomski instituted a similar reign of terror to that which he had practised in the Soviet Union. At Haidari, the prisoners, male and female, performed back-breaking manual labour. But the difference with Syrets was that this labour served no other purpose than to grind down the will of those performing it. Prisoners were ordered to dig pits, only for the SS to order them filled in again, to break rocks or build walls that once completed would be torn down again.33 In his year in command, Radomski had 1,800 prisoners executed, mostly by shooting. Another 300 were tortured to death, either at Haidari or in the infamous Gestapo headquarters in Athens. But Radomski fell from grace in August 1944. A heavy drinker, during one riotous bender he threatened his second-in-command with a pistol. Executing prisoners on a whim was absolutely fine to the Nazis, but threatening a fellow SS man was most definitely not allowed. Radomski was reassigned to a slightly more dangerous unit – fighting partisans in Hungary. In 2005, it was finally established that partisans had killed the monster of Syrets on 14 March 1945.

  Paul Blobel, the architect of the Babi Yar Massacre and Sonderaktion 1005, the foul clean-up job that cost the lives of so many more Jews, also ended up fighting partisans, this time in Yugoslavia. There seems to have been a conscious decision on the part of Himmler to quietly get rid of some of the mass murderers responsible for the Einsatzgruppen executions and the Aktion Reinhard gassings. Most were assigned to dangerous anti-partisan duties in southern Europe, where many were killed in action. Blobel survived until the end of the war and tried to make himself scarce. But the law eventually caught up with him, and he was arraigned before the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg in 1951. Unsurprisingly, Blobel, now but a shadow of his former self and sporting a grey beard, was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison, where Hitler had been held after the 1923 Munich Putsch, on 7 June 1951. It was a small measure of justice for his victims, believed in total to number over 59,000 people.

  Chapter 4

  Death Train

  ‘I felt a mixture of a hunger for adventure and the will to inflict [on] the Germans as much damage as possible.’

  Robert Maistriau

  The eerie shriek of a steam whistle cut the silent night air. Robert Maistriau, a 22-year-old Belgian Resistance fighter, scanned the track from his concealed position in the nearby undergrowth, his heart in his mouth. His two comrades lay close by. Then Maistriau heard the train puffing its way towards the trap, moonlight glinting off its large engine, black smoke rising into the sky, a long line of cattle wagons clanging and bumping along behind it. Maistriau tensed, grasping the cloth bag that he held in both hands even more tightly. The young Belgian felt excitement mixed with nervousness churning through his stomach as the train’s brake
s were suddenly engaged with loud screeches, the wheels freezing up and then furiously running backwards as the bogies reversed themselves in a desperate effort to stop. The ruse had worked. Maistriau made ready to charge from cover and head for the train. He was unarmed, but at that moment he doubted whether anyone could have stopped him. He and his companions had just done the seemingly impossible – they had stopped a Nazi train. Now the second part of their plan swung into frenetic action.

  The Jews of Belgium numbered around 75,000 people when the Germans first occupied the country in May 1940. Within a very short space of time, the whole horror of the Nazi police state had made its presence felt for the Jews, most of whom were already pre-war refugees from Germany or had fled Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the Nazi conquest. They were immediately subject to discriminatory laws and regulations. The main Jewish populations were concentrated around Antwerp and Brussels. By August 1942, the Germans had decided, in concert with their overall Jewish policy, to remove the Jews from Belgium and ship them east for ‘resettlement’. Deportations began at once from the notorious Mechelen Transit Camp.

  Also known as Casern Dossin, Mechelen Camp was a pre-war Belgian Army barracks complex, sturdily built over three floors and easy to adapt into a prison. Mechelen was located about halfway between the two main concentrations of Jews in Antwerp and Brussels, and was very close to a rail line, so it was deemed ideal for German purposes. The acting commandant was SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolph Steckmann and the garrison was entirely made up of men from the SiPo or Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), part of the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSHA – Reich Security Main Office) headquartered in Berlin.

  Conditions inside Mechelen were deliberately tough, the SiPo taking every opportunity to humiliate and beat their prisoners. ‘People were randomly hit sometimes just for the crime of “looking Jewish”,’ recalled Simon Gronowski, who was 11 years old when he entered Mechelen with his mother. ‘For the smallest infraction, we could be beaten up and locked in a cell until we were deported.’1

  The first Jews had arrived at Mechelen on 27 July 1942. Between August and December 1942, two transports of about 1,000 Jews each left each week bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Simon and his mother, Chana, were put aboard the twentieth evacuation train from Mechelen on 19 April 1943.

  The Germans had recently dispensed with using third class railway carriages, as too many Jews had managed to escape out of windows during the previous nineteen shipments, so Transport XX consisted of a Belgian locomotive and thirty-five wooden cattle cars. Into these primitive carriages the SiPo crammed 463 men, 115 boys under 15, 699 women and 127 girls under 15, a total of 1,404 Jews and Roma gypsies. ‘We were packed in like a herd of cattle,’ recalled Simon. ‘We only had one bucket for fifty people … There was no food, no drink. There were no seats so we either sat or lay down on the floor.’2

  As in the concentration camps, the Germans attempted to use Jews to control fellow Jews. Each car had one prisoner that the SiPo had appointed responsible for preventing and reporting attempts to escape. The Germans’ instructions were explicit and these Jews were told: ‘When anybody escapes, or you let anybody escape, everybody is killed!’3

  Regine Krochmal was a young Jewish nurse working for the Belgian resistance. The Gestapo seized her in January 1943 after a raid when she was caught red-handed stencilling resistance leaflets. Transferred to Mechelen from Gestapo Headquarters on 22 January, Krochmal suffered along with all the other inmates from the camp’s brutal regime. Selected for Transport XX, Krochmal was assigned to the infirmary wagon alongside a young Jewish doctor, Louis Micheels, tasked with caring for the sick until the train arrived at Auschwitz. Just before she boarded, the older camp prisoner doctor at Mechelen, Braun, surreptitiously handed her a large knife and urged her to attempt to escape as soon as she could.

  Once the wagon door had been slammed shut and bolted, Krochmal immediately turned to Dr Micheels and told him that she was a member of the Resistance and she had to escape. Krochmal urged the doctor to join her.

  ‘As a medical doctor,’ Micheels said, frowning, ‘it is my duty to assist the ill, not to escape from them.’4 Krochmal was shocked, but quickly gave up trying to change the doctor’s mind when he refused all of her entreaties to save himself while there was still an opportunity.

  For train driver August Buvens, the sight of the Jews being loaded aboard the wagons was appalling. ‘I did this trip with disgust,’ he later said, ‘but I couldn’t refuse, because otherwise I would be sent to Germany myself.’5 Buvens, with one fireman, did as he was told by the escort commander, an SS-Untersturmführer. The rest of the escort consisted of eighteen SiPo NCOs and privates armed with Mauser 98K rifles, pistols and Schmeisser MP40 machine pistols.

  Unbeknown to Simon or Buvens, the local Belgian Resistance had hatched a daring plan to try and help the wretched people on the train. Three young friends who had known each other since school would act almost alone in a daring and suicidal mission to rescue complete strangers.

  Youra Livschitz was a young Belgian Jewish doctor and Resistance member. He devised and commanded the raid. Two close friends, Robert Maistriau and Jean Frankleman, neither of who were Jewish, joined him. Between the three of them they had exactly one pistol and only a handful of cartridges. It seemed unlikely that they could do much to hurt the Germans. ‘In fact, we were badly organized and prepared,’ admitted Maistriau. ‘I felt a mixture of a hunger for adventure and the will to inflict [on] the Germans as much damage as possible.’6 But what form would this damage actually take?

  Livschitz conceived of a rescue mission against the weekly transport trains that left Mechelen with their cargoes of human misery. The plan was deceptively simple. They would stop the train and liberate as many prisoners as possible. Stopping a train was the first problem. They had no contact with the driver, and he wouldn’t voluntarily stop for any reason and risk serious punishment from the SiPo. They didn’t have any explosives with which to destroy the track ahead of the train, and anyway, such a classic Resistance tactic would have endangered the lives of the very people that they were endeavouring to save. But Livschitz realized that they could use the very rules of the railway to stop the train. They would rig up a fake stop signal and hopefully the driver would obey it. The second problem was how to deal with the guards. The Germans were heavily armed and ready for trouble. They also tended to shoot first and ask questions later. The one pistol that the three had was of only limited value. It would be used to distract the guards while the rescue was in operation. The third problem was the easiest to solve – how to open the cattle car doors. The Germans used wire to bind the doors shut, so stout pliers should be able to do the job.

  Maistriau was dispatched into Brussels to collect the materials needed for the raid. He purchased a large storm lantern and four pairs of pliers, and then went to another shop and bought glue and some red silk paper. The paper was glued over the lantern’s glass light so that when it was lit at night it looked like a red stop signal.

  The train timetable was already well known, the Germans being sticklers for timekeeping and regulations.

  Livschitz, Maistriau and Frankleman mounted their bicycles and were in position beside the train track by 9.30pm on 19 April. They had chosen an isolated stretch of track between Haacht and Boortmeerbeek, on a blind bend with thick woods on one side and open farmers’ fields on the other. The lamp was lit and placed in the middle of the track so that the train driver would see it suddenly as he rounded the corner. Frankleman loaded and cocked the pistol, ready to provide covering fire, while Maistriau lay close to the line, his bag of pliers in his hands. Nearby was Dr Livschitz.

  Aboard Transport XX, everything was proceeding according to schedule. The train thumped on through the darkened countryside, while inside the cattle cars people huddled in terror and discomfort. SiPo guards rode on some of the carriages or guarded the final truck, which was known as the Sonderwagen or ‘Special Wagon’. It contained
eighteen male and one female prisoners. These were Resistance members or people who had managed to escape from previous transports and been recaptured; what the SiPo called ‘Jumpers’. As ‘Special List’ prisoners, each had a red cross painted on the back of their clothes, meaning that they were marked for death on arrival at Auschwitz.

  In the infirmary wagon, nurse Regine Krochmal had started to make her escape. Removing the large knife that she had hidden in her clothing, she set about sawing through the pinewood bars that covered the wagon’s small window. Dr Micheels tried to stop her but she pulled angrily away from his grasp. She was ready to go when she felt the train start to slow.7

  When the driver, Buvens, rounded the blind curve that the Resistance had decided would be the ambush site and spotted the bright red light low down on the track, he knew instantly that something wasn’t right. It was clear that it wasn’t a correct railway signal, but fearing that the Resistance was about the blow the track ahead, he slammed on the brakes anyway.8

  ‘The brakes made a hellish noise,’ said Maistriau, ‘and at first I was petrified. But then I gave myself a jolt on the basis that if you start something you should go through with it.’9 He leapt up from cover and ran towards the cattle truck in front of him. Fortunately, the Germans hadn’t stationed guards on top of the carriages. If they had, Maistriau wouldn’t have had a chance of getting near the train. ‘I had to busy myself with the pliers. I was very excited and it took far too long until I had cut through the wire that secured the bolts of the sliding door.’ Once the wire was cut, Maistriau quickly drew back the bolts and ran the sliding door open. He shone his torch into the crowded truck, where ‘pale and frightened faces stared back at me’.10 At this moment firing broke out, loud gunshots renting the night air. Maistriau screamed at the Jews in French: ‘Sortez! Sortez!’ But no one moved. He tried again in German: ‘Schnell, Schnell! Flehen Sie!’ (‘Quick! Quick! Get out of here!’) At this command the spell was broken and the Jews surged for the open door and freedom.