The deportation trains, especially the cattle cars used for transporting Jews to the extermination camps, are among the iconic images of the Holocaust. This book is the first to study comparative escape attempts from these trains. In an earlier study, Simone Gigliotti explained why these horrible histories remain mostly unmentioned in survivor testimonies and commemorations: “Deportees journeyed with the living and the dead, were witnesses to and victims to suicide, became violated and violators in cramped conditions, and were bathed in the sensory reminder or their pestilential degradation and deprivations” (see The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust [2009], 214). Cattle cars were introduced in the nineteenth century and soon used to carry animals to their death. As such, the term and the image directly show the dehumanization process.
Tanja von Fransecky has found evidence of 158 escapes by Jews from deportation trains from France, 575 from Belgium, and 31 from the Netherlands. These staggering differences in numbers call for an explanation, which she finds through meticulous and multilayered research. Her sources include numerous archives, testimonies, and interviews she conducted; she comes to an analysis of structural and incidental factors in a comparative history of these three countries.
Incidental factors are the micro-histories of what happened inside the train wagons and compartments during escape attempts. Here it is first important to confront the variety of experiences during these deportation transports. The trains filled with deported Jews were not all cattle cars; the image of the cattle car has become dominant, but many passenger trains were used as well. The possibility to escape varied accordingly. The precise type of locks and the exact situation with armed guards present and watching on the platform at departure and during transport are important details. A sudden opportunity for escape arose, for example, when the doors of a passenger train compartment were not completely closed because one Jewish inmate held his knees firmly to the glass door, thus preventing its closing. Did the Nazi guard leave it at that by accident or by intent? Nazi guards who were not always paying complete attention created other moments of opportunity for escape that were used by a few prisoners keen and intent on escaping no matter what.
Each incidental escape is a complex history, in which moment of opportunity, courageous action, and sudden luck were important, but so were intent, preparation, and the determination to act. The decision to saw a hole in a part of a train car's wooden floor could provoke fear and anger among the deported Jews in that car, and could even result in efforts to stop the escape attempt. One person or one small group's escape could mean the other inmates risked being shot when, upon arrival or inspection, the total number of deportees showed some missing. Jumping a distance from a fast-moving train through a hole in the floor included taking the risk of being killed or wounded by the train itself.
Among the structural factors that explain the high number of escapes in Belgium and the low number in the Netherlands are the very high 95 percent of Jews deported from Belgium who lacked Belgian citizenship and who had recent experience with migration and fleeing to safety from eastern Europe, whereas in the Netherlands, 84 percent of Jews were Dutch citizens with no comparable experience whatsoever. A second factor is that French and Belgian Jews who attempted escape were mostly organized in socialist, social democratic, communist, or Zionist groups, whereas the Dutch Jews who attempted escape were not similarly organized. Other factors named by Von Fransecky include knowledge about and belief in the mass extermination of Jews happening in eastern Europe, and the knowledge of earlier successful escapes. The distance between the concentration camp and the border with Nazi Germany was smaller in the Netherlands, longer in Belgium and France. In the Netherlands, more passenger trains were used, from which fewer escape attempts took place, whereas in Belgium and France more freight trains and cattle cars were used, from which more people escaped.
Von Fransecky does not present an estimate of all factors at work in the empirical cases she has collected. She calls for more research into escape attempts in other countries and suggests that these histories should be included in resistance studies as examples of “escape resistance” (265). Apart from that, I see a broader connected field of potential comparative research into other escapes and forms of resistance in different historical circumstances and periods, for example, the study of prison breaks and escapes from psychiatric institutions, histories of escaping the slave trade during transport on slave ships and of resistance during slavery, in particular marronage (escapes of enslaved Africans from plantations into the hinterland of North American, Caribbean, and South American plantation colonies).
Von Fransecky has written an impressive, detailed study, very well researched, containing many spectacular histories showing how Jews took significant risks to survive, and a thoughtful analysis of the memories and the mixed emotions of Holocaust survivors. The individual histories are useful in teaching about the crucial moments that could define life or death, and inspire reflection about the possibilities for everyone to try to recognize forms of resistance against injustice today.
