dangerous but very bold

The leaps of faith that saved a brave few
from Auschwitz’s horrors: New study
reveals how hundreds of Jews used
desperate means to jump from Nazi trains
Research published in Germany tells
the hitherto unheard stories of the
estimated 764 individuals who managed
to escape the Holocaust by jumping to
freedom
Jews from all over Europe were brought
by train to the death camp at Auschwitz
in Poland
By TONY PATERSON
Tuesday 08 April 2014
Unlike most of his contemporaries there
was no dark blue death camp number
tattooed on to Leo Bretholz’s forearm. He
was one of the very few to escape the
Nazi gas chambers by daring to leap from
one of the heavily guarded trains carrying
him and fellow Jews to Auschwitz.
The contents of a latrine bucket helped
him jump. It stood in the middle of the
floor in a packed and filthy railway cattle
wagon bound from Paris to the infamous
death camp in Nazi occupied Poland – and
it was overflowing.
On the night of 5 November 1943, Mr
Bretholz, then just 21, and his friend
Manfred Silberstein had been trying for
hours to prise apart the iron bars of a
small window in the side of the wagon.
They had been using pullovers as
makeshift ropes. Someone suggested
soaking them in urine to strengthen their
grip on the bars.
“I fought to overcome my feelings of
nausea,” Mr Bretholz recalled. “I bent
down and soaked my pullover in urine.
There were bits of excrement floating in
it. I felt humiliated. It was the most
disgusting thing I had ever done,” he
added.
Yet the trick paid off. The two young men
were able to get the window bars far
enough apart to squeeze through. Perched
on the outside edge of the cattle wagon
they clung on desperately trying to avoid
the searchlight guards cast over the rail
convoy. When the train went into a
corner, they used the concave shadow to
jump.
The two escaped and managed to survive.
Leo Bretholz spent the rest of the Second
World War on the run from the Nazis. His
death in America just a week ago, aged
93, coincided with new historical research
published in Germany which told hitherto
unheard stories of the estimated 764
individuals who managed to escape the
Holocaust by jumping to freedom from
the Nazi trains carrying them to the death
camps from France, Holland and Belgium.
Tanja von Fransecky, a historian, spent
four years conducting interviews and
researching archives in Israel and across
Europe for her study “Jewish Escapes
from Deportation Trains”. She admitted
being astounded by the number of people
who had managed to escape the
Holocaust in this way. “I was amazed that
this happened at all,” she told The
Independent . “I had always assumed that
the wagons were stuffed full prior to
departure and simply opened on arrival
and that not much could happen in
between.”
Yet the author found out that the opposite
was the case. There were dramatic,
agonising and awful scenes as would-be
escapers struggled to break free from the
Nazi transports with the help of smuggled
tools or as in the case of Mr Bretholz,
urine-soaked pullovers.
Often the escapees faced angry criticism
from frightened fellow passengers.
“Hadn’t they been told that they would all
be shot if someone escaped?” and “who
will look after the old, the sick and the
tiny children?” they would ask.
Dr von Fransecky stressed that the
escapees faced a deep moral dilemma,
particularly if they left someone behind.
“It is one of the reasons why many
survivors kept silent for years after the
war,” she added.
Simon Gronowski, 82, did not talk about
his leap to freedom for almost 60 years.
As an 11-year-old he was rounded up and
held in a Nazi transit camp for Jews near
Antwerp, Belgium. His father had
managed to escape the Gestapo and he
hoped to rejoin him. He had heard about
people leaping off the death trains and he
used his bunk bed in the Nazi camp to
practice jumping.
His chance came in March 1943 as he and
his mother sat crouched in a stinking
cattle wagon bound for Auschwitz.
Encouraged by a raid by resistance
fighters which managed to free 17 Jews
from the train, a group of men in
Gronowski’s wagon managed to force
open the door. As the train gathered
speed, he hesitated but then leapt. His
mother’s last words to him were: “The
train’s going too fast.” She was murdered
in Auschwitz soon afterwards.
Simon Gronowski jumped. Others, like 25-
year-old Willy Berler did not. Imprisoned
aboard an Auschwitz transport traversing
Belgium, he was part of a group of six
young male prisoners who had managed
to break open a cattle wagon window and
were escaping one by one.
“Anxiously, I watched my comrade as he
climbed through the window,” he wrote.
“Then I pulled myself up and saw that he
hadn’t managed it. It was a horrible sight.
The boy was caught between two wagons
and his head had been crushed between
the buffers like a melon.”
Mr Berler said that if he had had the
“slightest idea” what awaited him in
Auschwitz he would have jumped. Unlike
thousands, he survived the camp. Simon
Gronowski, who also lost his sister in
Auschwitz, only sought to come to terms
with his traumatic experiences in 2002.
He had a reunion with the armed guard
who forced him and his family on to the
death camp train in 1943. The guard
begged him for forgiveness. The two men
wept as they fell into each others’ arms.
“My life has been full of miracles,” Mr
Gronowski now likes to say.