The Twentieth Train : The Remarkable True Story of the Only Successful Ambush on the the Journey to Auschwitz

On 19 April 1943, three young men stopped a train. The train was transporting 1,631 Jew to Auschwitz. Equipped only with four pairs of pliers, a hurricane lamp and a single pistol, the trio carried out a plan that had been hatched by Jewish members of the resistance but rejected as too dangerous by the armed partisans. The three friends managed to free seventeen men and women before German guards opened fire. By the time the convoy had reached the German border another 214 prisoners had managed to escape. Marion Schreiber's gripping book draws on private documents, archive material and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with escapees, to create a vivid, and often very moving, portrait of this unique event, and the world that engendered it.