Jewish Bravery In World War II Belies Claims Of Former Trump Official
Michael Flynn says Jews didn’t fight back against the Nazis in World War II but he never three brave Belgian resistance fighters, a young Jewish doctor, Youra Livschitz, and his two non-Jewish friends, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau.
On April 19, 1943, armed with a single pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern to use as a danger signal, they stopped a Holocaust train that had left Mechelen in Belgium. The train was packed with 1,631 Jewish deportees and heading for Auschwitz. After a brief fire fight, the train started again. Of the 233 people who attempted to escape, 26 were shot on the spot, 89 were recaptured, and 118 got away.
Livschitz was later betrayed and the Gestapo arrested him and executed him on Feb. 17, 1944, a week after his brother Choura Livchitz, also a Resistance fighter had been killed. Both Franklemon and Maistriau were arrested. Franlemon was held in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp before he was liberated in May 1945. After the raid on the convoy, Maistriau fled to the Ardennes forest, where he hid with the partisans for seven months before he was caught by the Nazis and sent to Bergen-Belsen camp until the liberation in 1945.
Flynn is a disgraced top national security advisor, military leader, right wing extremist and Christian nationalist who was pardoned by trump and was once considered as trump’s vice president. In a recent address, Flynn blamed Jews for not fighting back when Nazis forced millions onto trains to transport them to Poland and their deaths in World War II concentration camps.
Flynn offered his anti-Semitic comments at the recent, far right, “Protect Our Children Preserve Our Future” rally at Grace Christian Church in Michigan. In his speech, Flynn criticized Jews for not resisting when ordered to board trains during the Holocaust because, Flynn said, there weren’t “many guards” at Nazi-run concentration camps.
Flynn was a national security adviser to trump who pardoned him after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI regarding conversations with a Russian diplomat. Flynn has been criticized in the past for calling for “one religion” in the U.S. and retweeting an anti-Semitic message in 2016 blaming Jews for hacking the Republican National Committee’s emails.
Christian nationalists, like Flynn, believe that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and must return to being one, governed according to their conservative religious principles.
The rally was part of Flynn’s “ReAwaken America Tours.” In May, the tour event was held at the Trump National Doral Hotel in Miami, Fla. Trump called in to tell Flynn, “You just have to stay healthy because we’re bringing you back. We’re gonna bring you back.”
The thousands of Trump supporters attending the conference cheered wildly when they heard the former president praising Flynn and backing his potential return to government.
Flynn launched the “ ReAwaken America Tour ” after the failed Jan. 6 insurrection by trump supporters. The “ReAwaken” clown show holds conferences around the country touting a crazy blend of QAnon conspiracy theories, political rhetoric and revivalism. Events feature trump supporters like Eric Trump, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and former trump advisor Roger Stone, as well as Flynn.
Flynn’s comments are the latest in a series of anti-Semitic incidents tied to trump in recent months. Last November, neo-Nazi commentator Nick Fuentes was invited to a dinner at trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. More recently, Fuentes spoke at a far right, America First Foundation rally, and declared “war” against Jewish people.
“We’re in a holy war, and I will tell you this: Because we’re willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war,” said the 24-year-old Fuentes. “And they will go down. We have God on our side, and they will go down with their Satanic master. They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.”
Fuentes also was the keynote speaker at the recent Arizona-based College Republicans United National Convention in Prescott, Ariz.
At the Protect Our Children Preserve Our Future rally, Flynn recalled his thoughts after visiting a train station in Poland that had been used to transport Jewish victims from 1941–1944.
“Jesus, how could somebody stand there and just allow these people to do that to them? And then knowing what they knew, how could they get on that train? I would have rather attacked that machine gun nest,” Flynn said. “Knowing what I know today, I would never get on that train. … I give you that as a metaphor, because we’re all on this train right now, or we’re about to get on it, because we’re doing nothing.”
A statement by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said that Jews fought back in various ways.
“Jews carried out acts of resistance in every German-occupied country and in the territories of Germany’s Axis partners. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers,” the statement said.
Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in more than 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. The most famous was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April and May 1943. The Germans ended the major fighting within a few days, but 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.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum noted there were many factors that made resistance difficult, “including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators.”
A statement from the Auschwitz Museum said that “Favorable conditions for Jewish resistance were almost non-existent due to the overwhelming force and brutality of the German occupation. The sheer power, combined with deception and fear, made effective resistance extremely challenging.”
The Nazis tried to hide their “Final Solution,” claiming the Jews were being taken to “resettlement to the east.” The victims were told they were being taken to labor camps in Ukraine. In reality, from 1942 on, for most Jews, deportations meant being murdered at concentration camps.
Trains were commonly freight cars or cattle cars, packed with up to 150 deportees. There was neither food nor water and each boxcar had one bucket latrine. A small barred window allowed scant ventilation, which resulted in multiple deaths from either suffocation or exposure to the elements.
Once off the trains, the Jewish prisoners were separated into the old, the young, the sick and the infirm, who were sometimes faced with immediate death by shooting, while the rest were prepared for the gas chambers.
In total, more than 1,600 trains were organized by the Nazis and logged mainly by the Polish state railway company because the majority of death camps were located in occupied Poland.
The Twentieth Convoy,
A Holocaust train carrying Jewish deportees, was stopped by the underground just one time. That was when the Twentieth Convoy was the target of freedom fighters, Livschitz, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau.
A special wagon, Sonderwagen, had been added with 19 Jews (18 men and one woman) including resistance members and “jumpers” from previous transports. The “special list” prisoners were marked on the back of their clothes with a cross painted in red so that guards would know to execute them immediately on arrival at Auschwitz.
On the night of April 19, 1943, coincidentally the same day that the the Warsaw ghetto uprising began, Maistriau, 22, Livchitz and Franklemon, both 25, bicycled from their Brussels homes about 40 kilometers to Boortmeerbeek in Flanders. There they wrapped their lantern in a red rag and laid it on the eastbound railway track as a makeshift stop sign. Lying in the darkness, they watched as the train ground to a halt. Maistriau then crept out and ran to the train, forcing a carriage door open with wire cutters.
Seventeen deportees jumped out of the wagon and fled as guards opened fire. While Livchitz fired his pistol, Maistriau and Franklemon broke open a second wagon, urging the prisoners to run for their lives.
As the guards closed in, the trio took to their bicycles, racing back to Brussels. When the train finally set off, the men in another wagon broke into the open cars and escaped as well.
Among the Jews on the Twentieth Convoy was 11-year-old Simon Gronowski, his mother and sister. In an interview long after the war, Gronowski said that most of the prisoners knew they would be deported but had no idea that they would be executed en masse.
Gronowski recalled “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 the three young members of the Belgian Resistance.
Maistriau, one of the resistance fighters, recalled the 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!” Maistriau said.
The last recorded train was used to transport women who for three days in March 1945 were crammed into cattle cars to await further transport. Only 200 of the original 1,000 women survived the entire trip to Bergen-Belsen.
Anti-Semitism by Flynn is notable as he was high up in the trump administration. Anti-Semitic incidents have been steadily increasing, reaching the highest level since 1979, when the Anti-Defamation League began keeping track.
Last week, the Jewish Center for Students serving the University of Kentucky, received numerous violent, anti-Semitic threats. The police tracked the message system to Sendil Nathan, a former university employee who was quickly arrested.
Last month, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 26 calls threatening violence at synagogues from New York to California. The hoax calls to police departments or suicide hotlines around the country say that a man is considering killing himself and others or that a bomb has been placed in a building.
In New York, police went to synagogues with bomb-sniffing dogs. In North Carolina, worshipers were evacuated. In California, callers said there was a backpack bomb hidden under a bench.