'I jumped from the death train': Holocaust survivor on his extraordinary escape
'I jumped from the death train': Holocaust survivor on his extraordinary escape
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It was almost spring, when the Gestapo came for them. The Gronowskis had planned to escape through the back garden if the worst happened. But they were taken by surprise, sitting at the breakfast table sipping coffee and spreading jam on bread, when the doorbell rang.
"The door opened and two men shouted 'Gestapo. Papers'," recalls Simon, who was aged just 11. As the Nazis entered their small flat, his mother, Chana, and older sister, Ita, turned pale and started trembling. After examining Chana's ID card and passport, he confirmed her fears.
"You have been denounced," he said, curtly. It was March 1943, almost three years into the Nazi occupation of Belgium. As Jews, the Gronowskis had left their home six months earlier and gone into hiding in a different part of their home city of Brussels. But the Nazi's secret police had tracked them down.
Just a child at the time, Simon had no clue his family were to be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau - the notorious death camp where the Third Reich carried out mass murder with brutal efficiency. As the soldiers shouted at them to pack their bags, Simon grabbed his beloved scout uniform and followed his family into the unknown. Pointing at her young son, Chana asked: "The little one too?".
"Yes," they replied. "The little one too.". After their arrest in Belgium, they were held in a former army barracks in the neighbouring city of Mechelen. This was was Belgium's only transit camp, a holding place for Jews and Romani before their deportation to the extermination camps.
