The Twentieth Train : The Remarkable True Story of the Only Successful Ambush on the Journey to Auschwitz - Softcover

Schreiber, Marion

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843540444 ISBN 13: 9781843540441

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2004

Synopsis

'This book is a memorial to a lost generation' Daily Telegraph On 19 April 1943, three young men stopped a train. The train was transporting 1,631 Jews from the Belgian town of Mechelen to Auschwitz. Equipped only with four pairs of pliers, a hurricane lamp covered in red paper and a single pistol, Youra Livchitz, Jean Frankelmon and Robert Maistriau carried out a plan that had been hatched by Jewish members of the resistance but rejected as too dangerous by the armed partisans. The three of them managed to free seventeen men and women before the German guards opened fire. By the time the convoy had reached the German border another 214 prisoners had managed to escape. The Nazi search for the rescuers was swift and brutal. Youra was denounced, tortured and shot in 1944. Robert and Jean were arrested too but managed to survive the concentration camps. Marion Schreiber's gripping book draws on private documents, archive material and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with escapees, to create a vivid, and often very moving, portrait of this event, and the world that engendered it.

About this title

About the Author:

Marion Schreiber was born in 1942 in Drossen, near Frankfurt-Oder. A former Bonn editor for Der Spiegel (1970-86) and then its Brussels correspondent (1986-98), she is mother to three adult sons and now lives as a writer in Brussels.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1843540444
• ISBN 13: 9781843540441
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320