the incredible story of Simon Gronowski, the 11-year-old boy who escaped from the train to Auschwitz

One night in April 1943, when I was 11, Simon gronowski, a Belgian Jewish boy, jumped off the Gestapo train that took him to Auschwitz. He returned to Brussels, where he lived in hiding with two non-Jewish Belgian families and where he grew up and made his living after the war. In 2002, he told his story in a book called “Simon, the boy from convoy number 20”.

In this book, he recounts what happened that night of April 19, 1943 while traveling by train from the Belgian city of Mechelen, which served to concentrate the Jews who were to be deported, towards the German border. Inside, herded like animals by the Nazi Gestapo, 1,636 Belgian Jews were deported to the death camps.

A red light made the train stop. Three members of the Belgian underground organizing committee for the defense of the Jews, Youra Livchitz, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistrau, showed up and one of them pointed at the machinist with a gun. During this time, his two accomplices tried, between fire from the Nazi guards, to open the doors of the wagons to free as many prisoners as possible.

They opened two doors, those of the wagons 16 and 17. 215 people passed through these doors. The shooting of the Nazi guards claimed the lives of 26 people. The others were captured. But 17 people managed to escape, including child, Simon Gronowski, who was 11 at the time and whose mother pushed jump out of the wagon.

“I jumped off the train because my mother asked me to,” he recalls in an interview broadcast this Wednesday by RFI. “If she had told me to stay, I would have, and I would have died with her in the gas chamber.”

Simon was the son of León and Chana, Polish and Lithuanian exiles who had rebuilt their lives in Belgium and who saw terror come when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940.

That same summer they started evictions. 10,000 Belgian Jews received a “call for employment” to go to work “in the East”. Gathered in a military barracks, Dossin, in Mechelen, more than 25,000 were deported in 28 trains.

In the convoy in which Simon and his mother Chana were traveling 242 boys. Only Simon escaped alive. After jumping off this train, the same one that drove his mother to her death, Simon ran all night and arrived at dawn in a small town.

A neighbor took him to the gendarmes. And one of them, Jean Aerts, decided to protect the little boy and not to collaborate with the Nazis. This gendarme managed to reunite Simon with his father, who decided it was safer to stay away and handed him over to a non-Jewish Belgian family.

Simon lived until the liberation of Belgium with two families. His father died, ill, in 1945, in an already liberated Belgium. Her sister also died in Auschwitz.

Simon, an orphan, became a well-known jazz pianist and a renowned lawyer. Last April, while the population of Brussels lived in confinement, Simon opened his windows and Play the piano for your neighbors. Today, he is 89 years old and in poor health and lectures in schools.

In an interview with RFI, he admitted: “My life has been nothing but miracles.”

Brussels, special

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