Schrieber, Marion, and Whiteside, Shaun (Translator)
New York, N.Y. Grove Press, 2003. First American Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. 308 pages. Includes 20 black and white illustrations. Foreword by Paul Spiegel. Afterword to the English-language edition. Bibliography. Appendix: the deportees. Marion Schreiber was born in 1942 in Drossen and was an editor at Der Spiegel for sixteen years. The spring of 1943 was a desperate season for the Jews of Brussels. The resistance movement had successfully bombed the SS headquarters that January, but anti-Jewish laws were tightening, and a camp had been set up in the nearby town of Mechelen to transport Belgian Jews to Auschwitz. One day in April, resistance fighter Youra Livchitz, a young doctor, discovered the departure date of the next transport train. With only one weekend in which to organize a raid, Youra recruited two school friends, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, to pull off one of the most daring rescues of the entire war. Equipped with only three pairs of pliers, a hurricane lamp covered in red paper, and a single pistol, the men ambushed the train, which was transporting 1,618 Jews to Auschwitz. These three men freed seventeen men and women before the German guards opened fire. Miraculously, by the time the convoy had reached the German border another 225 prisoners had managed to escape and found shelter. The three young rescuers were turned in by a double agent, imprisoned, and killed. Marion Schreiber's gripping book about the only Nazi death train in World War II to be ambushed draws on private documents, photographs, archive material, and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with the surviving escapees. More