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This photo shows the unfair treatment that the Jewish people had to deal with.

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous https://t.co/h26aUcIUHj

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous pic.twitter.com/h26aUcIUHj
— Polish Embassy UK 🇵🇱 (@PolishEmbassyUK) January 21, 2018

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous https://t.co/h26aUcIUHj

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous https://t.co/h26aUcIUHj

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Irena #Sendler rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, refusing to reveal their identities even under torture. To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, the Polish Parliament declared 2018 the "Year of Irena Sendler". #PolishRighteous

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Sabotage in concentration camps by Ainsley Strang

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Sabotage in concentration camps by Ainsley Strang

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Examples of resistance (source Fighting back book):
- buried messages in ashes of victims: Auschwitz Sonderkommando wrote this letter in ashes of dead " Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Ten of documents are buried under it..."
- deliberately lowering speed of work so bombs and war weapons would take more time to make
- lowering quality of work: making it so that the resistance would have a slight advantage with from poorly made product: "Electrical connections could deliberately be left loose, just as seams on clothing could intentionally be made weak" Fighting back
- escaping camps: Two escapes at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, one involving Slovak Jews, and the second involving Czech Jews, both saved tens of thousands of lives.

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Sabotage in Concentration Camps By: Ainsley Strang

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Sabotage in Concentration Camps By: Ainsley Strang

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Real life examples of sabotage and the consequences if you got caught
Page 58: "The simultaneous hanging of 32 prisoners, accused of sabotage, by means of an electric hoisting device.
Page 58: "I work for 14 months in a weapons factory during which time an act of sabotage in occurred in the making of explosives."

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EUG NE ARONEANU, compiler of the accounts, was a Romanian who was given the task of drawing up the tables of atrocities for the Nuremberg trials. He died prematurely in 1960.

THOMAS WHISSEN, translator of the accounts, is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Wright State University. He is the author of Isak Dinesen's Aesthetics, A Way with Words, The Devil's Advocates: Decadence in Modern Literature, and Classic Cult Fiction: A Guide to Popular Cult Literature (Greenwood, 1992).

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This book is a translation of an oral history of the concentration camp experience recorded immediately after World War II as told by men and women who endured it and lived to tell about it. Their vivid, firsthand accounts heighten the reality of this experience in ways no third-person narrative can capture.

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Few Notable People During the Holocaust          By: Erin Kang

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Few Notable People During the Holocaust          By: Erin Kang

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1.) Irena Sendler - smuggled Jewish children away from ghettos
2.) Albert Goering - supplied resisting Jews with weapons and money

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During World War Two, many individuals from many countries risked their lives to save various minorities, especially Jews, from the horrors of the Holocaust. This list commemorates 10 of them. All these individuals were made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by the Israeli government in honor of what they had done.

Feng-Shan Ho was a Chinese diplomat who saved approximately 2,000 Jews during the early years of World War II. Ho was consul-general of the Chinese embassy in Vienna during the Austrian annexation. After the "Kristallnacht" in 1938, the situation for the almost 200,000 Austrian Jews got rapidly more difficult, but in order to leave the country they had to provide proof of emigration, usually a visa from a foreign nation or a valid boat ticket. This, however, was difficult and the Evian Conference, in 1938, where 32 countries had failed to take a stand against Nazi Germany, made this even more complicated. Acting against orders of his superior, Ho, for humanitarian reasons, started to issue visas to Shanghai. He continued to issue these visas until he was ordered to return to China in May 1940. After the war, Ho settled in San Francisco where he died in 1997. He was made 'Righteous Among the Nations' in 2001 for his efforts to save thousands of Austrian Jews.

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker. During World War II, she was a member of the Polish Underground and the ?egota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself. She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages. Despite being tortured and imprisoned by the Nazis, Sendler continued to do all she could to help Jewish children in Warsaw. In 1965 she was made 'Righteous Among the Nations', and died in 2008.

Hugh O'Flaherty was an Irish Catholic priest who saved about 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews in Rome during World War II. O'Flaherty used his status as a priest and his protection by the Vatican to conceal 4000 escapees - Allied soldiers and Jews - in flats, farms and convents. Despite the Nazis desperately wanting to stop his actions, his protection by the Vatican prevented them officially arresting him. He survived an assassination attempt and, along with the Catholic Church, saved the majority of Jews in Rome. He died in 1963.

Giorgio Perlasca was an Italian who helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them fake passports to travel to neutral countries. Despite fighting alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Perlasca became disillusioned with Fascism and escaped from Italy to the Spanish embassy in Budapest in 1944, where he became a Spanish citizen on account of his war experience. While there he worked with Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz in creating fake passports to smuggle Jews out of the country. When Sanz Briz was removed from his post, Perlasca pretended to be his substitute so that he could continue printing false passports. He also personally sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews while they were waiting for their passports. It is estimated he saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to Italy where he lived in obscurity until he was contacted in 1987 by a group of Hungarian Jews he had rescued, and his remarkable story became public. He died in 1992.

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat, serving as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped an estimated 6,000 Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from Poland or residents of Lithuania. From July 31 to August 28 1940, Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative. Many times he ignored the requirements and arranged the Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an extraordinary act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway at five times the standard ticket price. Sugihara continued to hand-write visas (reportedly spending 18-20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day) until September 4, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of them heads of household who could take their families with them. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit in hotel and after boarding the train, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out the train's window even as the train pulled out. Sugihara returned to Japan where he lived in obscurity until he was made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by Israel in 1985. He died the following year.

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German member of the Nazi party who worked as a special envoy to Nazi occupied Denmark. Although Danish Jews were initially treated quite favourably by the Nazis, by 1943 it was planned that they would be rounded up and deported to concentration camps. Risking his career, Duckwitz made a secret visit to neutral Sweden where he convinced Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson to allow Danish Jewish refugees to escape to Sweden. He then went to Denmark and notified Danish politician Hans Hedtoft about the deportation. Hedtoft warned senior rabbis in the country, and in the following two months, over 6,000 Jews were ferried secretly to Sweden in boats. After his actions, Duckwitz returned to his duties as a Nazi official, refusing to reveal what he had done in case of losing his job or worse. After the war, he continued working as West Germany's ambassador to Denmark. He died in 1973. Due to his actions, it is estimated that around 99% of Denmark's Jews survived the Holocaust.

Frank Foley was a British secret service agent estimated to have saved 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust. In his role as passport control officer he helped thousands of Jews escape from Nazi Germany. At the 1961 trial of former ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, he was described as a "Scarlet Pimpernel" for the way he risked his own life to save Jews threatened with death by the Nazis. Despite having no diplomatic immunity and being liable to arrest at any time, Foley would bend the rules when stamping passports and issuing visas, to allow Jews to escape "legally" to Britain or Palestine, which was then controlled by the British. Sometimes he went further, going into internment camps to get Jews out, hiding them in his home, and helping them get forged passports. He died in 1958.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes was a Portuguese Diplomat who ignored and defied the orders of his own government for the safety of war refugees fleeing from invading German military forces in the early years of World War II. Between the June 16 and June 23 1940, he frantically issued Portuguese visas free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror, 12,000 of whom were Jews. De Sousa Mendes worked in the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux, France, where despite explicit orders not to give visas to "foreigners of indefinite or contested nationality; the stateless; or Jews expelled from their countries of origin". De Sousa Mendes sporadically began printing Portuguese visas illegally as early as 1939, but it wasn't until mid June 1940, when Portugal's status was expected to change from 'neutral' to 'non-belligerent' which would make Portugal more allied to Nazi Germany. Between June 16 and June 23, de Sousa Mendes began frantically issuing visas, along with his friend, the Rabbi Chaim Kruger, to refugees waiting in line. De Sousa Mendes travelled to the border town of Irun on June 23, where he personally raised the gate to allow disputed passages into Spain to occur. It was at this point that Ambassador Teotónio Pereira arrived at Irun, declared Sousa Mendes mentally incompetent and invalidated all further visas. An Associated Press story the next day reported that some 10,000 persons attempting to cross over into Spain were excluded because authorities no longer granted recognition to their visas. As de Sousa Mendes continued the flow of visas, Dictator Salazar sent a telegram on June 24 recalling him to Portugal, an order he received upon returning to Bordeaux on June 26 but followed only slowly, not arriving in Portugal until July 8. Along the way he issued Portuguese passports to refugees now trapped in occupied France, saving them by preventing their deportation to concentration camps. After the war, de Sousa Mendes lived in destitute poverty, dying in 1954.

Dimitar Peshev was the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews. Bulgaria was a strong supporter of the Holocaust, rounding up thousands of Jews in occupied Thrace and Macedonia to be deported to death camps. However, when it came to its own Jewish citizens, the government faced strong opposition from Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Although Peshev had been involved in various anti-Semitic legislation that had passed in Bulgaria during the early years of the War, the decision by the government to deport Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews on March 8 1943 was too much for Peshev. After being informed of the deportation, Peshev tried several times to see Prime Minister Bogdan Filov but the prime minister refused. Next, he went to see Interior Minister Petur Gabrovski insisting that he cancel the deportations. After much persuasion, Gabrovski finally called the governor of Kyustendil and instructed him to stop preparations for the Jewish deportations. By 5:30 p.m. on March 9, the order had been cancelled. After the war, Peshev was charged with anti-Semitism and anti-Communism by the Soviet courts, and sentenced to death. However, after outcry from the Jewish community, his sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment, though released after just one year. His deeds went unrecognised after the war, as he lived in poverty in Bulgaria. It was not until 1973 when he was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations. He died the same year.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish humanitarian who worked in Budapest, Hungary during World War II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. Between July and December of 1944 he issued fake passports and housed several thousand Jews, saving an estimated 100,000 people from the Nazis. On July 9 1944, Wallenberg travelled to Budapest as the First Secretary to the Swedish legation in Budapest. Together with fellow Swedish diplomat Per Anger he issued "protective passports" which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and prevented their deportation. Although not legally valid, these documents looked official and were generally accepted by German and Hungarian authorities, who sometimes were also bribed.

Wallenberg rented thirty-two buildings in Budapest, and declared them to be extraterritorial, protected by diplomatic immunity. He put up signs such as "The Swedish Library" and "The Swedish Research Institute" on their doors and hung oversize Swedish flags on the front of the buildings to bolster the deception. The buildings eventually housed almost 10,000 people.

Wallenberg started sleeping in a different house each night, to avoid being captured or killed by Arrow Cross Party members or by Adolf Eichmann. Two days before the Russians occupied Budapest, Wallenberg negotiated with both Eichmann and General Gerhard Schmidthuber, the commander of the German army in Hungary. Wallenberg bribed Arrow Cross Party member Pál Szalai to deliver a note in which Wallenberg persuaded them to cancel a final effort to organize a death march of the remaining Jews in Budapest by threatening to have them prosecuted for war crimes once the war was over.

People saved by Wallenberg include biochemist Lars Ernster, who was housed in the Swedish embassy, and Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the United States House of Representatives, who lived in one of the Swedish protective houses.

After the war, Wallenberg was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets, and died in prison in 1947, though the date and circumstances of his death remain disputed.

On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli (soon to become Pope Pius XII) gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." During the war (when Pacelli had become Pope) he spoke out strongly in defense of the Jews with the first mass arrests in 1943, and L'Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist press came to call the Vatican paper 'a mouthpiece of the Jews.'

Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places: "[t]he Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of Jews - the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000 - were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope's summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy." [ Source]

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10 People Who Saved Jews During World War Two - Listverse

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During World War Two, many individuals from many countries risked their lives to save various minorities, especially Jews, from the horrors of the Holocaust. This list commemorates 10 of them. All these individuals were made 'Righteous Among the Nations' by the Israeli government in honor of what they had done.

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Examples of Resistance in the Holocaust                   By: Emily Rupp

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Examples of Resistance in the Holocaust                   By: Emily Rupp

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1. "organized armed resistance"
2. escaping to the forest
3. not giving Jewish people up to the Germans (people would hide Jews)
4. rising against guards
5. "aid and rescue"
6. "spiritual resistance"

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Organized armed resistance was the most forceful form of Jewish opposition to Nazi policies in German-occupied Europe. Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union.

In April-May 1943, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose in armed revolt after rumors that the Germans would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center. As German SS and police units entered the ghetto, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB) and other Jewish groups attacked German tanks with Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and a handful of small arms. Although the Germans, shocked by the ferocity of resistance, were able to end the major fighting within a few days, it took the vastly superior German forces nearly a month before they were able to completely pacify the ghetto and deport virtually all of the remaining inhabitants. For months after the end of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, individual Jewish resisters continued to hide in the ruins of the ghetto, which SS and police units patrolled to prevent attacks on German personnel.

During the same year, ghetto inhabitants rose against the Germans in Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok, and a number of other ghettos. Many ghetto fighters took up arms in the knowledge that the majority of ghetto inhabitants had already been deported to the killing centers; and also in the knowledge that their resistance even now could not save from destruction the remaining Jews who could not fight. But they fought for the sake of Jewish honor and to avenge the slaughter of so many Jews.

Thousands of young Jews resisted by escaping from the ghettos into the forests. There they joined Soviet partisan units or formed separate partisan units to harass the German occupiers.

Although many Jewish council ( Judenrat) members cooperated under compulsion with the Germans until they themselves were deported, some, such as Jewish council chairman Moshe Jaffe in Minsk, resisted by refusing to comply when the Germans ordered him to hand over Jews for deportation in July 1942.

Jewish prisoners rose against their guards at three killing centers. At Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibor in October 1943, prisoners armed with stolen weapons attacked the SS staff and the Trawniki-trained auxiliary guards. The Germans and their auxiliaries killed most of the rebels, either during the uprising or later, after hunting down those who escaped. Several dozen prisoners eluded their pursuers and survived the war, however. In October 1944, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, members of the Jewish Special Detachment (Sonderkommando) mutinied against the SS guards. Nearly 250 died during the fighting; the SS guards shot another 200 after the mutiny was suppressed. Several days later, the SS identified five women, four of them Jewish, who had been involved in supplying the members of the Sonderkommando with explosives to blow up a crematorium. All five women were killed.

In many countries occupied by or allied with the Germans, Jewish resistance often took the form of aid and rescue. Jewish authorities in Palestine sent clandestine parachutists such as Hannah Szenes into Hungary and Slovakia in 1944 to give whatever help they could to Jews in hiding. In France, various elements of the Jewish underground consolidated to form different resistance groups, including the Armée Juive (Jewish Army) which operated in the south of France. Many Jews fought as members of national resistance movements in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Slovakia.

Jews in the ghettos and camps also responded to Nazi oppression with various forms of spiritual resistance. They made conscious attempts to preserve the history and communal life of the Jewish people despite Nazi efforts to eradicate the Jews from human memory. These efforts included: creating Jewish cultural institutions, continuing to observe religious holidays and rituals, providing clandestine education, publishing underground newspapers, and collecting and hiding documentation, as in the case of the Oneg Shabbat archive in Warsaw that would tell the story of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, despite its destruction in 1943.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Organized armed resistance was the most forceful form of Jewish opposition to Nazi policies in German-occupied Europe. Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. In April-May 1943, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose in armed revolt after rumors that the Germans would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center.

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Gentiles and How They Helped  By: Erin Kang

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Gentiles and How They Helped  By: Erin Kang

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1.) hiding Jews in their homes
2.) false identities
3.) smuggling Jews to safer countries
4.) taking in orphaned children

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History & Overview of the Righteous Gentiles

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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The Difficulties of Getting Away By: Nick Rappoldt

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The Difficulties of Getting Away By: Nick Rappoldt

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Some of the most difficult aspects of lying about being Jewish were:  1) Being recognized by someone as Jewish. 2) The risk of identification papers being recognized as forged. 3) The constant worry of saying something wrong and giving themselves away.  However, the difficulties of escaping ghettos or concentration camps were much more dangerous, as the camps and ghettos were surrounded by large, barbed wire fences, and guards who were authorized to shoot immediately. ("Fighting Back" Book)

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Keeping Jews out of concentration camps:

Jewish Defense Committee, formed 1942, created fake IDs and hid about 4,000 children and 10,000 adults with non-Jewish families or religious groups

Tried to sabotage German war machine by setting fire to factories and derailing trains

Attacked offices containing names and addresses of Jews in Belgium, setting fire to papers used by Gestapo to round up individuals

Halted 20th Convoy, bound for Auschwitz, forcing open doors of several trucks to allow escape

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On 19 April 1943, a train carrying 1,631 Jews set off from a Nazi detention camp in Belgium for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But resistance fighters stopped the train. One boy who jumped to freedom that night retains vivid memories, 70 years later.

In February 1943, 11-year-old Simon Gronowski was sitting down for breakfast with his mother and sister in their Brussels hiding place when two Gestapo agents burst in.

They were taken to the Nazis' notorious headquarters on the prestigious Avenue Louise, used as a prison for Jews and torture chamber for members of the resistance.

Today, Gronowski lives a two-minute walk from this building, where he was held for two nights without food or water.

"My parents had made a mistake - only one, but a serious one, which was... to have been born Jewish - a crime that, at the time, could only be punished by death," he says.

From there, Simon and his mother and sister were transferred to the Kazerne Dossin, a detention camp 30 miles away in Mechelen, Flanders.

"People were randomly hit sometimes just for the crime of 'looking Jewish', so you had to keep a low profile," says Gronowski.

"For the smallest infraction, we could be beaten up and locked in a cell until we were deported. Sometimes they collectively punished the entire room of 100 of us, or make us stand in the courtyard for hours, day or night whatever the weather."

At first, I did not dare to jump because the train was going too fast
Simon Gronowski

Most of the prisoners knew they would be deported but had no idea, Gronowski says, that they would be executed en masse.

On 18 April, Simon and 1,630 others, including his mother, Chana, were informed they would be deported by train the next day.

His father, Leon, had been in hospital when the Germans had raided their home a month before. His mother had quickly thought to tell them she was a widow.

His older sister Ita - born in Belgium and already 18 - had Belgian citizenship and was therefore taken in a separate convoy.

Simon, who like his parents and most of Belgium's Jewish population was stateless, remembers seeing her for the last time, crying and waving to him as they left.

"I didn't really understand what was going on and what deportation would mean. I was still in my own little world, where I was a boy scout," he says. "I thought to myself, 'Goodbye my Brussels, my Belgium, my father, my dear sister, my family and my friends'."

Conditions inside the train were atrocious.

"We were packed like a herd of cattle. We had only one bucket for 50 people. How could we use it? How could we empty it? Besides, it would have been impossible to get to it," says Gronowski.

"There was no food, no drink. There were no seats so we either sat or lay down on the floor. I was in the rear right corner of the car, with my mother. It was very dark. There was a pale gleam coming from a vent in the roof but it was stifling and there was no water to be had."

Soon after leaving Mechelen, the 20th convoy was attacked by three young members of the Belgian Resistance armed with one pistol, red paper and a lantern.

They made a red light, a sign for danger ahead, forcing the train driver to brake sharply. This was the first and only time during World War II that any Nazi transport carrying Jewish deportees was stopped.

Convoy 20 in numbers

1,631 Jews on the train

233 tried to escape, including 17 freed by Maistriau

Of those, 118 succeeded in escaping, 26 died either from gunshot or in falling, and 89 were recaptured

As well as the 118 who got away, 153 survived Auschwitz, and 10 were held in Belgium until liberation in September 1944

Of the 17 freed by Maistriau, seven were recaptured - all of them died at Auschwitz

Simon Gronowski is one of few remaining witnesses

Listen to Simon Gronowski on Witness (BBC World Service)
Robert Maistriau, one of the resistance members, recalled that terrifying moment later in his memoirs.

"The brakes made a hellish noise and at first I was petrified. But then I gave myself a jolt on the basis that if you have started something you should go through with it. I held my torch in my left hand and with my right, I had to busy myself with the pliers. I was very excited and it took far too long until I had cut through the wire that secured the bolts of the sliding door. I shone my torch into the carriage and pale and frightened faces stared back at me. I shouted Sortez Sortez! and then Schnell Schnell flehen Sie! Quick, Quick, get out of here!"

After a brief shooting battle between the German train guards and the three Resistance members, the train started again.

More on World War II from the BBC
Why did the Nazis want to wipe out the Jews? Listen to stories of persecution The People's War - Stories from Belgium BBC - History World War Two
Some had escaped from the opened wagon and the mood among the remaining deportees had changed. Those who had dreamed of escape suddenly become more determined and more desperate.

An hour later, men in Simon's wagon succeeded in breaking open the door. Cool air flowed into the stifling, crowded carriage. Chana Gronowski gave her son a 100-franc note which he rolled and slid into his sock, then she pushed towards the door.

Simon was too small to reach the footrail beneath the door by himself, so his mother lowered him down by his shoulders.

"My mother held me by my shirt and my shoulders. But at first, I did not dare to jump because the train was going too fast for me," he says.

"I saw the trees go by and the train was getting faster. The air was crisp and cool and the noise was deafening. I remember feeling surprised that it could go so fast with 35 cars being towed. But then at a certain moment, I felt the train slow down. I told my mother: 'Now I can jump.' She let me go and I jumped off. First I stood there frozen, I could see the train moving slowly forward - it was this large black mass in the dark, spewing steam."

But the train slowed to a stop for a second time that night and the German guards began shooting again, this time in Simon's direction. "I wanted to go back to my mother but the Germans were coming down the track towards me. I didn't decide what to do, it was a reflex. I tumbled down a small slope and just started running for the trees."

Simon walked and ran all night, through woods and over fields.

"I was used to the woods because I'd been in the cub scouts. I hummed In the Mood to calm myself, which was a song my sister used to play on the piano," he says.

Simon wanted to get to Brussels and his father, Leon.

Simon knew he risked arrest but, by dawn, he knew that he would need help. With torn, muddy clothes, he knocked on a village door and told the woman who answered that he had been playing with friends and had got lost. At the time, Belgians who failed to turn in Jews to the Gestapo would be shot and the woman took Simon to the local police officer.

For the first time, Simon was terrified. "The sight of this man in his uniform with his gun in his belt, terrorised me. I was sure he would bring me back to the Germans. He asked me what had happened and I kept telling him that I had got lost and I was playing with children and that now, I had to go to Brussels."

The policeman, Jan Aerts had guessed Simon came from the Auschwitz convoy. The bodies of three escapees were lying in the police station at that very moment. However, Aerts had no intention of betraying Simon. His wife fed him and gave him clean clothes.

Belgium's Jewish Resistance

Jewish Defense Committee, formed 1942, created fake IDs and hid about 4,000 children and 10,000 adults with non-Jewish families or religious groups

Tried to sabotage German war machine by setting fire to factories and derailing trains

Attacked offices containing names and addresses of Jews in Belgium, setting fire to papers used by Gestapo to round up individuals

Halted 20th Convoy, bound for Auschwitz, forcing open doors of several trucks to allow escape

Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Aerts arranged for Simon to catch a train back to Brussels where he arrived that evening. Simon was reunited that night with his father, a shopkeeper, although they spent the remaining years of the war hidden separately by Catholic families.

Chana Gronowski was sent to the gas chambers on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Simon's sister Ita, 18, arrived in Auschwitz on the next but one convoy, and also died there.

In all, 25,483 Jews and 351 Roma were deported from Kazerne Dossin. Of the 233 people who attempted to escape from the 20th convoy with Simon Gronowski, 26 were shot that night, 89 were recaptured and 118 got away.

The 20th convoy was unique in that there was an attempt to rescue the deportees. It was unique in being the only convoy from which there was what could be called a mass breakout. According to some sources, it was also unique in that although 70% of the women and girls were killed in the gas chambers immediately on arrival, the remaining women were sent to Block X of Birkenau for medical experimentation.
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As for the three young Belgian Resistance members who stopped the train, Youra Livschitz was captured later and executed. Jean Franklemon was arrested soon after and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was freed in May 1945. He died in 1977. Robert Maistriau was arrested in March 1944. He was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and lived until 2008.

Jan Aerts was declared a "Righteous Gentile" by the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. Leon Gronowski died within months of the end of the war.

Simon Gronowski paid his way through university. He chose to be a lawyer because, he says, the Nazis had tried to dispossess and demean him, and he saw the law as the best way of countering that. Today he lives in Brussels and still practises law. He has children and grandchildren. He plays jazz.

For more than 50 years he hardly spoke about his past but Maxime Steinberg, a Belgian historian and specialist in the persecution of Jews in Belgium, persuaded him to write a book.

He now also speaks regularly in schools.

"I speak about what happened to me so that you will protect freedom in your country," he explains to children.

"I want you to know that the most important words are 'peace' and 'friendship'. I speak to bear witness, to combat anti-Semitism, all forms of discrimination and Holocaust denial; to honour the dead and the heroes who saved my life - Jan Aerts, who risked certain death in protecting me, the Catholic families who hid me during the war, and my mother, the first of my heroes."

Simon Gronowski's story, and those of many others, is also told in the new Kazerne Dossin Museum and Documentation Centre of the Holocaust and Human Rights, which opened in December.

Built facing the actual transit centre - now an apartment block - the museum cost 25 million euros and was financed by the Flemish government. Its archives include 1,200 photos of the people on the 20th convoy.

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On 19 April 1943, a train carrying 1,631 Jews set off from a Nazi detention camp in Belgium for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But resistance fighters stopped the train. One boy who jumped to freedom that night retains vivid memories, 70 years later.

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Resistance in the Ghetto By: McKenna Hill

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Resistance in the Ghetto By: McKenna Hill

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- In the Ghetto, Jewish people insisted to oppose the Nazis and practice their religion, all the ghetto councils organized secret schools and classes for children. The Nazi attempted to abolish religion and culture, but the residents  held services and put on plays and concerts.
The Jews in the ghettos knew that they were going to die anyway, so they started to not cooperate and disobey the Nazis, anyone refusing to take an order from a German was usually shot on the spot, this information was from "fighting back".

- In the source below it states that guns and weapons were smuggled into the ghetto and the Jews would resist while the Nazis were in the deportation processes, which resulted in more deaths.

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Jewish Uprisings in Ghettos and Camps, 1941-1944

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RESISTANCE IN CAMPS Under the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance and uprisings in some Nazi camps. The surviving Jewish workers launched uprisings even in the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. About 1,000 Jewish prisoners participated in the revolt in Treblinka.

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Erin Kang
Ainsley Strang
Nick Rappoldt
Emily Rupp
Mckenna Hill