The Nazi Ghost Train
Evasion, Betrayal, and Escape during World War II
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A London Sunday Times bestseller
The heart-racing true story of the heroic rescue of Allied airmen from a Nazi prison train after a devastating betrayal.
In the final hours before the liberation of Brussels in 1944, the Germans loaded more than 1,400 members of the Resistance, SOE agents, and Allied airmen onto a train bound for the Neuengamme concentration camp. What happened next came to be known as the miracle of “The Ghost Train,” as members of the Resistance rose up to delay, divert, and eventually derail the train and save the lives of all of those on board.
The book shines a light on everyday heroes who have been lost to history: such as New Yorker Ted Kleinman, a Jew who risked his life to carry out sabotage behind the lines; young Resistance heroines such as Michou Dumon, who ordered an attempt to kill one traitor and escaped to London to expose another to British intelligence; and Belgian businessman Gaston Masereel, who planned to parachute into his homeland as an SOE agent. Badly hurt when his plane was attacked, he killed all four German soldiers who came to arrest him.
As well as the heroes, there is a villain every bit as keenly drawn and despicable as any in a spy thriller: the most heartless double agent of all—Prosper Dezitter—a traitor of such cunning that he came to be seen as an almost mythical bogey man. A convicted rapist and swindler, he enlisted the aid of his Spanish-born mistress to create a false network of helpers to ensnare airmen and résistants. It was a process which made Dezitter a millionaire.
Investigative journalist Greg Lewis draws upon a wealth of primary sources and his own extensive interviews to bring to life a cast of unforgettable characters, as The Nazi Ghost Train unfolds in a tense and pacy narrative, describing the feeling of terror after being shot down on bombing missions, the fight to stay alive with the Gestapo on your trail, and the gut-wrenching horror of betrayal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Lewis (Defying Hitler) offers a by turns hair-raising and humane saga of resistance against the Third Reich in its waning hours. In the fall of 1944, as the Allies were advancing on Brussels, fleeing German troops loaded more than 1,400 POWs from Saint-Gilles army prison—an assortment of Belgian partisans and political prisoners, captured British spies and saboteurs, and Allied airmen shot down over Belgium—into a packed train headed for the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. But the train's operators and railroad workers along its path worked to delay and divert it, ultimately stopping it from reaching the German border, a thrilling feat that Lewis teases in his opening before turning back the clock to trace the backstories of the captives. Many of them had ended up imprisoned at the hand of one of WWII's "darkest villains," a Belgian traitor named Prosper Dezitter, who created a false network of résistants that infiltrated authentic liberation networks. The prisoners' cat and mouse tales of evasion and capture take up most of the narrative, leaving the train's liberation for the final act, which feels a bit rushed after the long buildup, though the railroad operators' ingenious methods of delaying the train—as they whisper reassurances to the prisoners that "this train will not cross the border"—are nevertheless riveting. WWII history buffs will relish this.
