“Laja’s last journey”
Laja Menen was captured by the Gestapo on May 11th 1943 in Brussels and taken to the Dossin-Barrack in Mecheln.
Two and a half months later, on July 31st 1943, she was sent on her last trip from there with the XXI. convoy, a cardboard sign, 183 written on it, around her neck.
Because in Auschwitz her serial number and death file could not be found, she was most likely taken directly to the gas chamber of Birkenau and murdered there.
In the Nazi-bureaucrats’ accurately controlled list that kept hold of the incomers, 1355 men and women as well as 208 children were registered. Ten captives were able to jump off the train during the ride but three of them were struck dead later on by guarding troops.
A maximum of precaution had been established to prohibit the incident from the last transport in spring by all means, so that no one would be able to escape. The XX. transporting train, that started on April 19th 1943 from Mecheln to Auschwitz, was stopped by three young Jewish men to free several train passengers, „a unique event in the history of the Holocaust“ (Marion Schreiber).
Thus Laja’s convoy left Mecheln in broad daylight, accurately inspected and heavily guarded, but taking well deliberately not the default route. The train, with overall 1556 Jews inside, changed course behind Löwen. The continuation of the journey did not go via Tirlemont as usual, but via Hasselt. For further safety the transport was escorted and guarded till the border by German and Flemish SS-people as well as by members of the “Deutsche Judenabteilung”.
Security agents from Germany were also detailed to reinforce, so that one policeman was designated for forty deportees. The XXI. convoy transported the same amount of Jews as the previous XX. convoy back on April 19th. But this time more then three and a half months had been needed to get the train “filled”. Kurt Asche and his executioners were, as already mentioned, not nearly as “successful” as in 1942. Since April 24th 1943 there was only an average number of 16 entries per day in the deportation lists. Unfortunately, in spite of caution, Laja was among these.
On August 2nd 1943 the overfilled train with Rudi’s mother on it reached the death-place Auschwitz.
The oppressed people, pent-up on cramped space and under outrageous hygienic conditions, were en-route for about three days. Three days en-route to hell.
….
Like with the previous death-train from Mecheln, now 70 percent of the arrivals were immediately taken to the gas chambers of Birkenau and murdered instantly.
There was no time to lose. 1087 people overall: Women, men and children, old men, infants and pregnant women.Evisceration like on the assembly-line, not hesitating for even a minute. Since spring 1943, Birkenau possessed the perfect killing-machine with a blistering capacity, given through new crematories and perfected gas chambers. Industrialised genocide. Only 466 deportees of the XXI. convoy survived the first hours after the arrival in the concentration camp Auschwitz.
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The imprisonment tampered the Jews from Belgium, who were not immediately sent to the gas chamber, a lot. More than the captives of the previous convoy. The survival rate of the XXI. convoy was particularly low. Only 2,6 percent, which means just 40 out of the 1563 Jews who were deported on July 31st 1943, lived to see the liberation. Laja was not among them. She ended up in a degrading common grave and left behind a small boy in faraway Flanders, who could remember her facial features already only vaguely.
„That we didn’t know „, was said after the war over and over again. But there were enough confidents. „Because“, said the journalist Jan Brügelmann, „to commit such a crime, many wheels have to mesh. Woolly academics and staffs have planned, policemen have rounded the victims up at their hometowns in front of numerous eye witnesses, railway employees have prepared and executed the transport. And last but not least there were specialists in the German industry who organised or puzzled out the use of forced labourers, how to kill even more people and eliminate their corpses.“
