At the time of departure from Mechelen, this transport consisted of 1631 people, including 262 children. One of them is the youngest child deported from Belgium, nr. 215 on the list, a girl on 11 March 1943, barely 39 days before her departure for death.
The 20th convoy, which is very typical, also carried away one of the oldest deportees, nr. 594 on the list, born 7 August 1852. He would have been able to celebrate in 91th birthday, if he had not been deported to Auschwitz. Equally typical are the circumstances of this transport. To avoid escapes, the SS police had the transport of 19 April leave at night, like the others, but for the first time in cattle wagons, from which the little windows were locked.
Despite these precautions, many escapes will occur: 231 deportees attempted to escape before the border. Most succeeded, although the SS escort fired shots. 23 corpses lied along the railroad track of the Belgian route. In addition, three others were fatally injured.
The escaped jumped from the rolling train. They had organized their escapes themselves through tools they had taken from the assembly camp (Caserne Dossin), sometimes with collaboration of the “workers”, who had been working since the fall of 1942 for the administration of the SS police or for SS Major Philipp Schmitt personally, as transports during winter period were cancelled. However, the case was discovered and Schmitt had to leave the command of the assembly camp to the ordinary SS-adjutant Johannes Frank, shortly before the departure of the 20th convoy. In addition to the stolen “tools” a few files were also smuggled into the camp with the packages, handed out by the VJB. (VJB: translated Association of Belgian Jews). From the outside, however, they had thought of a different solotion than escape.
Since the beginning of the year, the Defense Committee for Jews (C.J.D. : Committee for Defense of Jews) registered clandestinely all information about the genocide. Immediately after its establishment after the large raid in Brussels of September 1942, it was clear – as it was published in the Bulletin Intérieur du Front de L’independence on 17 October 1942, that “the Gestao prepared for deportation of the entire Jewish population of Belgium Tens of thousands of people are being exposed to a horrible death”.
The information that then seeped through convinced the C.J.D. of the actual genocide that took place. Ghert Jospa, the initiator of the clandestine committee, is planning an attack against the 20th convoy. The project by no means corresponded to any act of the armed resistance. Nowhere in the Europe of the Final Solution has one dared to make such an attempt. Not even the Allies bombed the railway junctions, which lead the convoys to the concentration camps. The groups of armed resistance, to which the C.D.J. turned, did not venture in such a daring act.
A young Jewish doctor, who had no responsibilities in the organization, adopted this crazy idea which would cost him his life. Georges, alias Youra Livschitz, shall be executed in February 1944 as a terrorist hostage, because he had taken part in the attack of 19 April 1942 against the Jewish convoy. (train transport). He was however not the “chief of a terrorist gang”.
On 19 April, his “gang” consisted of two non-Jewish former classmates, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau. Equipped with only a revolver of small caliber and a lantarne, this daring trion forced the 20th convoy to stand still between Boortmeerbeeck and Wespelaer, just before Leuven. They hardly had time to implement their liberation plan. They were not aware that German agents would be present at the front of the convoy. During the fusillade, only Robert Maistriau managed to open a wagon in the middle of the convoy. A maximum of 17 deportees escaped.
The remaining 1400 deporteed arrived 22 April 1943 in Auschwitz. 880 persons were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. But the killing of those 880 deportees of this rebellious convoy did not go “without problems”. At a request of Auschwitz, Berlin sent an imminent telex to Brussels. In this, the Government Security “repeats”, “for obvious reasons, the question (…..) not to make any allusion during “the journey” that could cause any resistance from the Jews and not to raise any suspicions about the way they will be accommodated”.
Of the 20th convoy, barely 520 deportees were accommodated in Auschwitz. Half of them were women: 245. Many of them will have to undergo “medical experiments” in block 10 of the main camp (Auschwitz I). Paradoxically, the deportees of this 20th convoy will have one of the highest survival rates of the entire “Belgian deporation”: 150 deportees will still be alive at the liberation of the camps.
Source: the Memorial of the Deportation of the Belgian Jews, pages 30 and 31.