What the Allies saw on the trains to Dachau led them to shoot without orders.

It is one of the most tragic stories from the end of World War II. As the war turned in favor of the Allies and France was on the verge of liberation, hundreds of prisoners were loaded onto a train bound for Dachau in Toulouse in the early summer of 1944. This is the story of a handful of men who tortured civilians for weeks.

This political deportation train was one of the last to depart for the extermination camps. Most notably, its journey lasted two months, the longest of the entire Second World War. Fifty-seven days of hell. Thirst, thirst, thirst! Going insane. Going insane! With their voices cut off, machine-gun fire, hijackings, and sabotage—the train constantly stopped, disappeared, and reappeared, forging its way through the front lines.

The train was supposed to stop 20 times, and 20 times it did. That’s why it was called the “ghost train,” because it was nowhere to be seen. Why did Nazi Germany, in the midst of its collapse, insist on deporting its prisoners? The Nazis’ determination to see these deportation trains through to the very end is simply incomprehensible.

“Giving them a chance was out of the question. Who were they to be so valuable in Hitler’s eyes? Would the ghost train be carrying some of France’s greatest resistance fighters to deportation? To the French militia and police, they were vermin that had to be exterminated. When Papa left, they said nothing. I’ve been scarred my whole life, of course.”

How could it be otherwise? Would the resistance succeed in stopping this train and preventing it from reaching Dachau? What collaboration did the Nazis engage in? The SNCF management waged war against the railway workers. How did these men and women endure their long period of suffering, crammed together in cattle cars? How many would escape?

“I had one in a thousand chances to escape, and here I am.” Thanks to the extraordinary testimonies of some survivors and their families, here is the incredible odyssey of the resistance fighters in this convoy, better known as the Ghost Train.

August 18, 1944, Sorgues. A strange group of prisoners marches through this small town, just a few kilometers from Avignon.

Charles Tessier was just 10 years old when he saw them pass by. “There was a pharmacy over there. Here, in the background, was the town hall. You can see the military police flanking the convoy. Can you see the look on their faces? They weren’t amused. People weren’t looking at us; they were all cowering in fear, except for the children, who weren’t afraid of anything.”

A veritable column of the living dead, so impressive that he couldn’t see the end. This vision would haunt him for the rest of his life. “I crossed the street right in front of an Opel in which the officers were sitting. I was close to the car and could even touch the hood. I could see the German officers with their insignia and everything.”

“The deported colony was at the very end, with the women at the front, stamping their feet. There was a line of military police standing against the walls of the houses, beckoning people inside. I came face to face with a military policeman who forcibly pulled me inside and jabbed me with his cane. But I had enough time to see the convoy go by; it just kept going and going, it’s a terrible thing.”

I can still see them. It’s an image that has always haunted me. We didn’t know where they came from or where they were going. No one could say. It wasn’t until half a century later that Charles learned about the origin of this convoy, whose story had been almost forgotten. The story begins in the early summer of 1944.

The Allies had just landed in Normandy, and despite the intensity of the fighting, the Germans continued their macabre deportation program, which had begun in 1942. By the end of June 1944, over 100 convoys had already sent 70,000 French Jews and almost 40,000 resistance fighters and political prisoners to the extermination camps.

Against this backdrop, in Toulouse, in southern France, on July 3, 1944, hundreds of prisoners were taken to the Matabiau train station, onto the tracks reserved for freight. Their nightmare was about to begin. We are at the end of the Matabiau platform, near the grim station used for all the deportation convoys.

This was the discreet departure point for these people, men and women of the resistance, who had already endured months of imprisonment, only to be locked in these cattle cars bound for an unknown destination. They suspected they were being sent to labor camps, but they had no idea of ​​the horror that awaited them.

They certainly didn’t. “At 2 a.m., they woke us and took us in cell-carrying trucks to the Toulouse rail yard.” Ange Alvarez is the last witness. The last

One of the survivors of the ghost train deportation. He was only 18 when he was put on this convoy. “There were military police there too, because you could see them with their vehicles.”

“They were elite troops. The German officer leading the convoy said to us: ‘We are taking you to Germany, we are going to kill you all because you are all thieves or parasites or terrorists.’ We knew we were being deported, and he said it loud and clear, in French. There were 60 of us. The train car was full.”

Who organizes and controls the departure of a deportation convoy? The Reich Police. In Toulouse, it was the Gestapo that determined who would leave, who compiled the lists of names, and who selected the prisoners. The Gestapo in France is the same Gestapo that runs the concentration camp system. Claude and Raymond Lévy, the writer’s father, were on the list of those deported.

“It wasn’t a train departure, as my father told me. Hundreds of men, already exhausted, were taken to the loading ramps, loaded like cattle into wagons, and found themselves standing inside, crammed together in cars without windows—just two small skylights—in what would become a record-breaking summer.”

“Now they’re going to close the doors, and we won’t be able to get out. The Krauts were right there. There was a machine gun on the floor, magazine loaded. I said, ‘Listen, by the time that guy ducks down, we’ll be on him.’ We grabbed the machine gun, started firing, and everyone ran. He said to me, ‘If you move, we’ll call the Germans.’”

And then we set off toward Bordeaux. At that point, the Germans decided to head west. Bordeaux, Tours, Paris, then Germany, with Dachau at the end of the road. The most logical route would have been via Limoges, but troops in the Limoges area prevented freight car convoys from passing through.

The troops of Georges Guingouin, France’s first Maquisard, also spread terror among German troops in the Dordogne and around Limoges. Consisting of a few passenger cars for the German soldiers and a dozen cattle cars crammed with hundreds of prisoners, the convoy headed for Bordeaux. But Ange Alvarez was prepared to do anything to escape this trap.

“There were three of us who wanted to escape together. So we decided to escape through a small window. The three of us fought with each of the officers guarding the window. The snipers blew up the tracks, so they couldn’t go fast. When the train left Sainte-Bazeille, it was moving very slowly.”

“Then it went dark. I pushed back the planks, and the barbed wire came with them. And I started to stick my head through. I did a somersault, but the train stopped. Then they turned on the spotlights and started shooting at me. I started running toward the Garonne River, and they shot at me, but they missed.”

Ange suffered a head injury when he fell from the train, but he managed to muster the strength to dive into the Garonne and return to the small village of Couture on the other side. He was taken in and hidden for two days. He was the first escapee from the ghost train. “No one else escaped like me because we had a one in ten thousand chance of getting away like that.”

“When the Krauts saw you, they had lights for the night and machine guns. What I did was insane. I had one in a thousand chances of getting out, and here I am. I reconnected with the Resistance and kept fighting. I did my duty, that’s all.” But to fully understand who these deportees of the Ghost Train were, we have to go back in time.

Because Ange Alvarez isn’t just any prisoner. He’s only 18, but he’s already been in the Resistance for two years and months since his arrest here in the Saint-Michel prison in Toulouse. Around 120 of the Ghost Train deportees came from this prison. They were all resistance fighters, heroes, barely 20 years old, like Damien Nardone.

Norbert, his son, entered the prison for the first time, where, in the early summer of ’44, what the French police called “terrorists” were tortured, tried, and shot every day. “It’s strange to have seen it from the outside when I was young, and now to be inside, knowing where my father went. He arrived on April 13, 1944.”

“He left on July 2, but on the ghost train. It’s moving. Very moving. My father joined the combat group, initially distributing leaflets, then explosives, then bombings. Unfortunately, he was arrested by French gendarmes. The French gendarmes handed him over to the Gestapo, and from there he ended up in Saint-Michel prison. He was very young then.”

It was between the ages of 16 and 19.

That was the year it all happened. A number of leading members of the Toulouse resistance were imprisoned in Saint-Michel, including Albert Lautman, who was in charge of the secret army. Also imprisoned there was the entire staff of the 35th Brigade, Marcel Langer, and the FTP-MOI (Francs-Tireurs, Partisans Main d’Œuvre Immigrée), who were the victims of a massive French police raid in April 1944.

These men and women were to be handed over to the Germans by the Vichy regime. Behind these walls, in one of the dungeons of the Toulouse prison, Ange Alvarez was also imprisoned and tortured, first by the French police. “They beat all four of us from the special team. It was the special cleaning team.”

“It was called an FTP group. French Francs-tireurs et Partisans. I had killed Krauts, but I had also killed Frenchmen who had sold out to the Germans. For 15 days and nights, they beat me to make me betray the network. I didn’t betray anyone. I have bumps all over my head, and I still have holes in my skull. In Toulouse, they put me in a special cell; we were all sentenced to death.”

“We were all young people. When they opened the cell, we didn’t know who they would call. There are these sham trials where you have three French judges in the morning. The prisoner comes in, has no lawyer, is immediately put on trial and sentenced, and half an hour later is shot in the courtyard.” Papa’s friends were Boris Frankel, Enzo Lorenzi, and Emile Jackubowitz.

” Many of them were shot, young people between the ages of 16 and 25, most of whom died shouting “Vive la France” with a foreign accent. Like all his comrades in the 35th Brigade, Raymond Lévy and his brother Claude believe they will suffer the same fate, as a message, as a trace. Raymond hammered away at this piece during his imprisonment.

“He wrote, he engraved it, with a little dig: There are still Bastilles to conquer. Twenty-first FTP Raymond Lévy.” The ghost train transported 120 resistance fighters imprisoned here in the Saint-Michel prison. But the largest contingent of prisoners loaded onto the train from Toulouse on July 3, 1944, came from the Vernet concentration camp.

The camp in Ariège imprisoned foreigners from all over Europe, the vast majority of whom were Spanish Republicans. Most were political opponents of Hitler, Mussolini, Pétain, and Franco. Many were anti-fascists, of course—all committed people. In total, around 35,000 people were interned. The Vernet camp had already been emptied in several waves of deportations.

At the end of June 1944, there were still 403 internees who boarded the ghost train. “My grandfather was with them. My grandfather was 55 at the time. He was one of the oldest. Carlos Bourani founded the Italian Communist Party in Florence. He was Juan de Pablo, a kind of professional revolutionary who had been trained in Moscow.”

Francisco Nitti wrote the first book about the history of the ghost train even before the end of the war. The Vernet camp was handed over to the Germans by the French administration on June 9, three days after the landings. All the camp commandant’s reports state that they expected the prisoners to take control of the camp after D-Day.

The Germans had no confidence in the state of our prisons. French prisons were sieves, overcrowded and prone to escapes. For this reason, repression intensified in the region, with the Vichy militia, but also with the notorious SS Division Das Reich, stationed in the southwest. Their record included massacres like the one in Oradour-sur-Glane, where just days earlier the entire population of the village—643 people—had been murdered.

While one of the SS Das Reich battalions moved toward Normandy, on June 8, 1944, a battalion remained in the Pyrenees sector on Hitler’s orders to crush any form of resistance there. In this climate of total war, with heightened vigilance since the escape of Ange Alvarez, the ghost train resumed its route.

The convoy consisted of resistance fighters from the Saint-Michel prison and the Vernet camp, as well as about thirty women from the Noé camp. They, too, were resistance fighters. A total of 550 prisoners, guarded by an escort of about 150 soldiers. It may seem surprising to organize such deportation convoys in the middle of summer 1944, when Allied troops were just beginning to establish themselves in Normandy.

Until the very end, Hitler believed he would win the Second World War. All these final deportations by convoy can be explained primarily by this relentless suppression of the resistance. The ideological enemies of the Reich must not be given a chance;

The communists, the Jews, these prisoners could not leave the Nazi prisons alive.

These first fighters continued their long agony toward the extermination camps. The train arrived in Bordeaux, then headed north toward Angoulême. But at the small Parcoul-Médillac station, Royal Air Force planes targeted the convoy. The tension was extreme. The Allies wanted to prevent German troops from reaching the front in Normandy.

The train came to a halt, but the carriages were made of wood, so the bullets sliced ​​the prisoners in two—it was a massacre. “Dad, what he told me was that he was convinced he would die the next time he passed by. But he said he had to try something. He took off his white shirt, asked Claude for his blue shirt, and waved the pennant.”

As they swooped down on the convoy, the squadron leader saw the pennant, so he flew low again, and when he reached the wagon where the pennant was flying, he did so. His wingtip was 5-6 meters from the wagon. “My father always said to me, ‘You know, in my whole life, that was the moment when I saw freedom, both closest and furthest away from me.'”

There were injuries and several deaths, including on the German side. In the confusion, two prisoners escaped. The locomotive was damaged. Perhaps the end of the ordeal for the deportees, but the train finally reached Angoulême. The victims were evacuated, and after two days of hesitation, the train commander decided to turn back and seek refuge in Bordeaux.

A strategic retreat. The ghost train arrived in a city heavily influenced by collaboration, with a mayor, Adrien Marquet, who had been an ultra-collaborator. Prefect Sabatier and his deputy, Maurice Papon, were involved in the deportation of Jews. There was also a parallel police force that collaborated with the Gestapo and likewise carried out mass arrests of resistance fighters.

Six days after leaving Toulouse, the train was blocked at Bordeaux station. The convoy commander searched for a solution, a route to Dachau. For three days, the prisoners remained crammed into their cattle cars without food. Then, suddenly, on July 12, the Germans ordered the deportees to leave the train.

They walked through a deserted Bordeaux to a surprising destination. The ghost train was at Saint-Jean station, and since they didn’t know what to do with the 550 prisoners, they found a place to hold them: the Bordeaux synagogue, which had already served as a prison on January 10, 1944, when the Jews of Bordeaux were rounded up.

The 550 prisoners had to get in at all costs. Everything was devastated. They were housed inside the synagogue, guarded by the Nazis above. But at least here they could lie down and find some coolness on the stone slabs. They also realized for the first time how many of them there were. Above all, hope was rekindled when news from the front reached these walls.

The French living in the buildings surrounding the synagogue went out onto their balconies with signs to inform the prisoners right under the noses of the Germans: “Hold on! The Americans are coming!” It was like that—small acts of resistance. The sum of these small acts of resistance ultimately constituted the resistance itself.

The prisoners in the ghost train clung to this hope and even began to dream. Their comrades in the resistance, it was clear, would liberate the country and bring them out of their suffering alive. On June 5, the eve of the Normandy landings, the resistance organized what they called the “Green Plan,” a general national plan to sabotage the railways.

By July, the network was practically unusable. The priority was to prevent the Germans from advancing toward the front in Normandy. Hindering them, sabotaging anything that could harm the German war effort—that was the priority in the summer of 1944. Back in the Maquis, Ange Alvarez, the first escapee from the Ghost Train, actively participated in these acts of sabotage.

“Since I was a former miner and knew about dynamite, I was asked to do something to blow up wagons, but not trains, because the locomotives were driven by the French. I invented a device with electrical wires, and when the train passed over it, it brought the two devices into contact, causing the charge to rebound 20 meters.”

” “I blew up about forty trains this way. 45%, almost half the aircraft in the Southwest region, were unusable by the end of July 1944.” For the Germans, all these regions had become difficult to cross. More and more Frenchmen were joining the resistance, swelling its ranks. For the command

The situation became seriously complicated near the end of the train.

It had been stuck in Bordeaux for two weeks. They didn’t know what to do, so they put these boys in the synagogue. They had orders to take them to Germany. They studied the staff maps, wondered what to do, and received orders that were probably contradictory. There were fights everywhere, even in the synagogue.

Because in their own way, the passengers of the ghost train were still resistance fighters. Some, like Christian de Roquemaurel, the young founder of the Bir-Hakeim Maquis, were plotting escape. “My father was determined to escape. There was, of course, a stained-glass window looking out, and he immediately thought that this was the way he could escape.”

He and two other prisoners hid, and the Germans searched for them. They were put in the courtyard, against a wall. Every time they moved even slightly, they were met with a barrage of blows, and eventually they lost consciousness. “They were told they were heroes after being greeted with applause when they came in with the other prisoners.”

But they had no memory of it because they were practically unconscious. Along with his two comrades, Christian de Roquemaurel narrowly escaped execution. But their executioner wasn’t always so merciful. While imprisoned in the Bordeaux synagogue, they celebrated July 14th. More than half of them were foreigners.

What brought them together was the Marseillaise. The Nazis didn’t like them singing the Marseillaise at all. They arbitrarily selected ten of them. All ten were shot on July 31, 1944, because they had sung the Marseillaise. Albert Lautman, head of the secret army in the Toulouse region, was one of the ten executed. The repression became increasingly barbaric.

It was a sign of the Germans’ nervousness, as they sensed the war was lost. Hitler was being challenged by a faction within his General Staff. On July 20, he escaped Operation Valkyrie and the assassination attempt. While he boasted to Mussolini, whom he received that same day, the Axis powers were in complete disarray. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets were now in Poland, and on July 24, they were the first to discover the horrors of the Holocaust at the Majdanek extermination camp.

The resistance fighters on the ghost train had no idea what their executioners had in store for them. On the same day, July 24, the Allies launched Operation Cobra in Normandy, near Avranches, in an attempt to finally break through the German front. But Hitler did not give up; quite the contrary. The deportations intensified.

The final stage of the escalation of repression came on July 30, 1944, when Hitler issued the infamous decree “Terror and Sabotage,” which ordered the abolition of trials before military tribunals. These proceedings were taking too long. The Nazi police in occupied France now had to either execute on the spot or systematically deport victims of repression to concentration camps.

Many networks were infiltrated by the Gestapo. Around 300 resistance fighters were shot in the region, in addition to the many Maquis members who were wiped out by German combat troops. The situation was truly one of terror, with an increasing number of raids and arrests of resistance fighters. Among these arrests were around 150 more resistance fighters who would share the fate of those deported on the ghost train when it resumed its journey to Germany. Among them were young recruits like Marcel Pilet.

He is his younger brother, and above all, he was very young. He was just a resistance fighter, not a leader. “Dear sister and brother-in-law, I’ve been in prison since I left. I didn’t dare tell Mom. She’s worried enough already. You must have suffered…” And then there are network leaders like Georges Bonnac.

This leading resistance fighter was even destined to command the FFI (Forces françaises de l’intérieur) for the entire Aquitaine region. Gilberte, his daughter, saw her life turned upside down in an instant that morning in the summer of ’44. “That’s the last photo of the three of us at peace. It was during the war. The last photo of happiness.”

“We didn’t know what was going to happen. There were two Germans in suits, two men. I later found out they were actually Gestapo men. They were standing in the back of the room, and the militiaman was talking the whole time. They didn’t say anything. When Dad left, they didn’t say anything. I never saw my father again.”

“He had been tortured, and there was no risk of anyone seeing him. Then, you know, the Nazis were terrible. We have no idea now. They have no idea. Everyone flinched, you know, everyone was afraid.”

At the end of the war, Gilberte Bonnac discovered that her father had been deported on the mysterious ghost train.

“I’ve been scarred my whole life, of course. How could it be otherwise?” And here, in the Fort du Ha prison in Bordeaux, the French police and the Gestapo tortured and imprisoned resistance fighters. René Lafont has a similar story. As the leader of a Maquis in the Médoc, he was the victim of a massive roundup.

“On the day of his arrival, he was tortured. They ripped out one of his fingernails, and the next day they did the same thing. Kicks… seven broken teeth, a perforated stomach. The Krauts carried him in for questioning, and he couldn’t walk. Incidentally, the person who had been arrested and taken to the Gestapo at the same time saw him that same evening and said, ‘Lafont, he must be dead by now.’”

He was completely broken. Today is August 5, 1944. It will soon be four weeks since the commander of the ghost train sought a way to leave Bordeaux and return to Germany. And it was another train that showed him the way. On July 30, a new prisoner train also left Toulouse, traveling for five days through the Rhône Valley.

For him, there was no doubt that this was the route to follow. All that remained was to find some functioning steam engines. The Germans decided and ordered the SNCF, which carried out the work. This was the armistice agreement. It was truly a collaboration between Vichy and the occupying powers, following the armistice of June 1940.

No sooner had the armistice been signed than 6,000 German railway workers, the renowned station commanders, arrived at the Gare de l’Est in Paris, under the command of Colonel Goritz. From that day in June 1940 onward, the 400,000 French railway workers at the SNCF were now working for the Third Reich. The Reichsbahn, i.e., Berlin, took control of this indispensable tool, the SNCF.

The Vichy government placed the entire legitimacy of the state’s royal structures at the service of the Nazi Reich. The SNCF management had no qualms about either the racial or the political deportations, because the machine had to keep running. This train will find its way. It may seem astonishing, but it’s so simple.

The day we put them back on the train in Bordeaux, the day the Allied armies bombed Bordeaux. But no orders had been given to bomb the railways or the port. It came to nothing. And this is not the only time in this story that fate could have taken a turn for the worse. On August 9th, the ghost train set off again, leaving Bordeaux with over 700 resistance prisoners on board and an escort of at least 150 soldiers, along with SS officers and sometimes the officers’ wives. The Germans hoped to return to Germany as quickly as possible, in no more than three or four days. History would prove them wrong.

In the cattle cars, hell began anew. They endured scorching heat, with record temperatures of nearly 40 degrees Celsius, with little to eat and almost nothing to drink. All the resistance fighters had to overcome the hardships that lay ahead was solidarity.

The friendships forged on that train are incredible. “De Roquemaurel, a military leader of the Bir-Hakeim Maquis, who came from a tradition of Mauristianism, antisemitism, anticommunism, and hostility toward the Popular Front, found himself in a kind of solidarity, fighting alongside Jews like Silberfeld and communists like those of the 37th FTP-MOI Brigade.”

“I was impressed by this kind of unity in the resistance, this brotherhood in the fight against the Nazis.” In other words, even on the train, they never stopped being resistance fighters. And let’s not forget the transport conditions. There was almost no food. They were hungry and thirsty. There were entire days when he had nothing to drink.

“I was impressed by this kind of unity in the resistance, in the brotherhood of fighting against the Nazis.” “At one point he says he was so thirsty that his tongue swelled up and he felt like he had a crust on it, that’s how little saliva he produced. Thirst, thirst, thirst! People went crazy after a few days. Thirst, much more than hunger.” Norbert Nardon’s father never found the words to tell his son this story, but he left him this testimony.

“We were crammed into the train, dying of heat, dying of thirst, being eaten alive by lice. I remember looking out the skylight at the scenery, that’s all. Half of us lay down, the other half stood up. I saw colleagues drinking their own urine. We had a can of peas to relieve ourselves. We used it all.”

“There wasn’t enough room for everyone to lie down on the train.”

We had to take turns being near the window; it was very hot. The filth, the lack of hygiene—it was terrible. We’re going crazy. We’re going crazy.” Raymond Lévy used to say, “All our human integrity is disappearing.” They’re using the methods they’ve always used: inhumanity.

In other words, we don’t feed them, we don’t give them water, we let them live like dogs, and we go to the ends of the earth. It’s the fascist sadism of the Nazis. When the train arrived in Remoulins, we pulled a corpse out. Some of them were truly at the end of their strength. Dying people, attracting attention for the first time.

Upon arrival at Remoulins station on August 13, this strange convoy was still there the next day. Its presence piqued the curiosity of a young woman, Madame Damiani. Alone against the occupying forces, she brought food supplies. The train commander relented. He prefers not to provoke the hostility of an entire village. Water. Bread. Madame Damiani saves emaciated bodies on the verge of collapse.

Most importantly, she managed to inform the Red Cross, which obligated the Germans to respect the Geneva Conventions and provide for their prisoners. For the first time since Bordeaux, they emerge from the cattle cars. Finally, some fresh air. The Germans allow them to eat in small groups. Their strength would prove crucial for the remainder of their tragic odyssey.

In the region, sabotage by the Resistance and Allied bombing raids prevented the train from departing again. Inside the wagons, the deportees wonder: Why couldn’t the Resistance intervene during this long journey through southern France and stop this convoy once and for all to free them? “That’s why this train was called the Ghost Train, because there were no signs of it anywhere.”

“Even the resistance, I think, would have had difficulty knowing whether it would pass through or not. It was truly a ghost train. It often traveled at night. How do you attack a train with hostages inside? Resistance fighters who had been arrested by the Germans guarded the train very well. There were extremely well-equipped firing positions with heavy machine guns.”

The resistance fighters were only armed with machine guns, and these were often Sten submachine guns, so it was an extremely complicated situation. It even seems almost shocking that the resistance couldn’t stop all of these deportation trains, but if you look at the resistance landscape surrounding the ghost train’s journey, if we take the case of August 15th in Marseille, the resistance was in the process of liberating Marseille.

It was obsessed, focused on one goal: the liberation of the territory. On August 15, 1944, the Allies and France launched Operation Dragoon. The second landing, in Provence. 1,000 boats and approximately 100,000 soldiers created a southern front. The goal: to encircle the Germans. American and even French tanks were 200 kilometers from the train. Never since leaving Toulouse had the prisoners been so close to freedom.

“When they were in Remoulins and learned that the landing in Provence had taken place and that the Allied armies would advance up the Rhône Valley, it gave them tremendous hope. They sensed it was the end, and I think that when the train was experiencing so many difficulties, they knew the Germans were in trouble.”

On the other hand, the situation for the convoy commander was getting worse and worse. It was now impossible to reach Avignon. The bridges had been bombed. The road north was held by the Maquis. Too risky. But the train commander didn’t give up and thought he could escape the trap. On the night of August 17-18, the ghost train set off again and stopped a few kilometers further on, in Roquemaure, right in the middle of the gorge.

“It was clever because it positioned itself among the rocks to avoid being seen by the planes, to be protected. It’s like a ghost when it’s in that wall. The proof is that nobody in Roquemaure saw this train. People got off car by car, and then the convoy set off again on foot across the fields. The train commander’s plan was to cross the Rhône on foot, on the bridge that hadn’t yet been bombed, then march through the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, under a blazing August sun, to reach the small station in Sorgues, 17 kilometers away.”

To the Sorgues station, where another train was waiting. The convoy leader had pulled out all the stops. “He managed to make the train invisible, and so on. I think this German lieutenant was gifted. He was a very strong guy and…”

He proved it. He’s probably at the very bottom of the human ladder. He’s a sadist, he’s a madman.”

“But the madness I attribute to him in no way excuses his awareness of what he’s doing. I think he’s a very clear and conscious sadist. My father told me that during the march between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Sorgues, in the scorching heat, they were completely out of shape. And then there was the crossing of the vineyards; the prisoners were thirsty and hungry, and the Germans took the grapes and feasted on them.”

Any prisoner who tried to approach a vineyard was shot on the spot. The 700 prisoners arrived in Sorgues, and here, at the end of the march, 10-year-old Charles saw them pass by on August 18, 1944, weakened by all the hardships they had endured since leaving Toulouse 45 days earlier.

His mother kept Charles on the sidelines, but his friend Lucien Caraï was able to witness the rest of the story. “They were loading people into the cars, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I was completely exhausted. I don’t know if you saw it, but the train was over there. And the first cars were there, stretching all the way to the end over there. They were loading people into the cars.”

The ghost train that vanished into thin air in the Roquemaure Gorge reappears here, fully restored, with the same mix of passenger cars and cattle cars. The railway workers who brought the locomotive back from Avignon deliberately didn’t fill it with much water so the train couldn’t leave again. They had almost no water left.

The water crane was broken and sabotaged, so the resistance fighters knew they couldn’t leave. “They never imagined the boss was Machiavellian and that they had to fill it up by the stream over there, 100 meters away. They made the prisoners fill the tank with buckets of water. Another ordeal and torture for all the prisoners in the convoy.” Exhausted, they were forced to feed the new locomotive themselves, the one that was supposed to take them to the extermination camps.

But the people of Sorgues began to take action to help them. Women hastily organized themselves to distribute food to these unfortunate people, about whom they knew nothing. The Germans blocked the road and confiscated the food and drink. They kept much for themselves; the rest went to the deportees in the train cars that were standing there.

“That’s why they allowed it, because they had nothing left to eat. My father always said, ‘I don’t understand it. We change cars, we change trains, we change stations, and it all happened so fast.’ In the middle of the war, the famous train commander must have had support, and we don’t really know where it came from, because train cars don’t connect themselves.”

The escort commander was primarily responsible, and in a matter of hours, or even days, he managed—surprising as it may seem—to find a means of transport. This also meant that cooperation with the Vichy structures continued into the summer of 1944. Right up to the last day, the SNCF billed the French state for the convoys, right up to the last minute.

And that was August 18, 1944, just a few days before the liberation of an entire country. The railway workers here in Sorgues actually tried to sabotage the train, despite threats from the occupying forces and surveillance by their superiors. The SNCF leadership was waging war against the railway workers—in other words, at the behest of the occupying forces, who were likely to join the resistance, and these workers were arrested by the SNCF.

Railway workers also feared deportation. More than 2,600 SNCF railway workers died during deportation or were shot after being sentenced to death in the summer of 1944. In any case, in Sorgues, on the platforms of this station, where confusion reigned, railway workers took every risk to save some of the deportees as they were being loaded back into cattle cars.

Sometimes by disguising them as railway workers, but mostly by showing them the entrance to a narrow underground tunnel that crossed the tracks. They managed to escape through the canal that ran under the tracks, and you could walk through it hunched over. So there were perhaps twenty escapes that way. The Germans couldn’t count them because those who left hadn’t even realized they’d escaped.

They certainly wanted to get away quickly; they knew the American troops were after them. The Americans were a hundred kilometers away. It happened here on August 18th. The Americans arrived on the 25th, a week later. Now we’re going to Avignon! We’re going south. Avignon, 10 kilometers from Sorgues. The city of the Popes…

The nerve center of the German command in Southern Europe.

Gerhard Boeckel is a German writer who has researched the history of the ghost train on both sides of the Rhine. His findings provide valuable insights. “I found in the military archives in Germany that on the same day, August 18, 1944, at 12:30 p.m., the military command ordered the relocation of the military administration from Avignon to Germany. I also found in this document that the resistance hid the trucks. It is also interesting that the French administration, which had previously collaborated somewhat, refused to work with the Germans, and the civilian population went on strike. They closed all the shops, hotels, and restaurants. That was the situation on August 18, when the ghost train was in the area.”

If France belatedly discovered its spirit of resistance, the Maquis was once again unable to do anything to stop the ghost train on the day it was revealed to the public.

If France belatedly discovered its resistance spirit, the Maquis could do nothing to stop the ghost train on the day it was revealed to the public.

It was impossible to assemble enough fighters in just a few hours to attack the train and the 150 armed military police escorting it. That same day, about 30 kilometers from Sorgues, fighting broke out between resistance fighters and Germans who were evacuating the region. The Allies and the resistance were advancing.

But once again, the ghost train managed to slip through and escape north. In the south, one city after another was liberated. Toulon and Marseille were on the verge of falling, and Perpignan was liberated on the 18th. Toulouse, the city where this entire saga began, celebrated on the Place du Capitole on the 19th. On that day, the ghost train arrived in Pierrelatte.

Suddenly, it was attacked again by Allied aircraft. The Anglo-American armies controlled the skies over all of France. A deluge of fire rained down on the convoy, which the aircraft mistook for a German troop train heading north. Terrified, the deportees, trapped in their wagons, had no choice but to trust in fate. They didn’t know if this was a sign that the train would be stopped, or if it was a sign that they would all die.

“They were packed so tightly together, one was shot, and my husband had his knee right next to him. On the other side, they were like this, crushed by a machine-gun bullet that went through the arm, neck, and other arm of someone who was right next to him.” The next pass by Allied aircraft was even more deadly.

In the Lévy brothers’ wagon, several of their comrades were mortally wounded. One of Toulouse’s most prominent resistance fighters, a member of the 35th FTP-MOI Brigade, was also killed. One of its co-founders with Marcel Langer, his name was Jacob Insel. To be killed by Allied bullets on August 19, the day Toulouse was liberated, is a deeply tragic injustice.

The Germans were not spared and also suffered losses. But the resistance fighters of the Fantôme Train lost five of their comrades that day. They were evacuated a few kilometers further on to Montélimar. Fate took its toll on these increasingly weak prisoners, whom no one freed, even though they had been traveling through France for a month and a half.

And the train continued toward its grim destination: Valence, Lyon, soon Mâcon. In the carriages, the prisoners wondered whether the Allies would finally catch up with the train or whether they should escape. Not everyone was in favor of escape; it was dangerous. They knew that if they made such a decision, reprisals might follow.

They clashed with another group who refused to flee, as it posed a risk to those who didn’t leave. By this point in the journey, about sixty prisoners had already successfully escaped, taking advantage of stops, machine-gun fire, or the help of railway workers. And despite threats, there were no reprisals from the commander.

These enemies of the Reich, whom he was leading back to Germany, seemed to be the best he had ever exploited. “There were many Germans here who wanted to board the ghost train, but the commander refused to let them in because they would then have to abandon the prisoners. The hostages were there to prevent an Allied attack. That much was clear.” The train could have been used to transport retreating battalions. But according to several witnesses, the convoy commander even threatened this other Wehrmacht officer’s request.

But who is this ruthless executioner? Some call him Schuster, others Baumgarten. Charles Tessier dreams of unlocking the secret of his identity, which has also become a ghost.

“I’m obsessed with it.”

to find out who the convoy leader was. And I think it was Baumgarten. We have Gestapo documents in Bordeaux, and it was Baumgarten, the lieutenant, who commanded the convoy. Then, in Sorgues, we found a document in which he is mentioned. It says First Lieutenant Baumgartner. In this photo, he is shown in front of Hitler, who is decorating him. As far as I’m concerned, his face and appearance are exactly the same because he matches the description, but this research needs to be confirmed.” He wasn’t an SS man, the convoy leader; he was a Wehrmacht officer, a regular army officer. As fate would have it, First Lieutenant Baumgartner was a fanatical officer who insisted on following orders to the bitter end.

Rage dictated it, and we did it. Faced with the determination of Nazis who refused to lose their ideological battle, there was no other option. We had to take all the risks and escape. While France’s eyes were fixed on the uprising in Paris, the resistance fighters on the ghost train were on their own as the German border drew ever closer.

In two days, perhaps less, they would have been in Germany, and it would have been too late. On the train were some Spaniards from the Vernet camp. They had brought some tools from the camp because they made sandals there. “These were old wagons, so you could see the rails through them. The floor was held together by two bolts. We urinated on the bolts, and we dug with their tools. I’ll show you the tools, if you can remember them.” “I can call it that. My brother and I kept it for 75 years. I don’t know how he managed to hide it, but he did.”

Using the pocketknife, they pried the head of the bolt out of the way, the bolt fell out, and then, with the handle of the pitchfork, they lifted the planks. “My brother and I never parted with the knife.” They took turns day and night. It had started three days earlier. Here, under the train, the resistance fighters imagined their rescue.

“Those who escaped, like my father, by jumping from under the train, would stand on the axles, and when the train slowed down, they would jump flat onto the track. If they jumped in the middle of the track, they could get caught under the last car, so they had to jump to the left or right and stay flat until the entire train had passed.”

“` “If you jump, if your feet touch the ground, you’ll be crushed under the train, so jumping is a huge risk. It’s not like James Bond, where you jump through the door; you have to jump under the tracks.” It was the same procedure that had already proven successful a few days earlier in Nardone’s and de Roquemaurel’s carriage.

De Roquemaurel was the first to jump. Assoun jumped, but his foot was amputated, and the Maquis caught up with him the next day. It was the middle of the night. “I had wrapped my head in a terrycloth towel to protect myself.” This time, on the night of August 24–25, a large-scale escape was underway. Taking advantage of a slowdown beyond Dijon, near Merrey to be precise, on the very day Paris was liberated, over 70 resistance fighters threw themselves under the train, one after the other.

A day or two later, they would have found themselves in Dachau. They knew it was their last chance to leave the train. “There were three boys who were run over, I think. Two or three.” As for the 62 women trapped on the ghost train, none of them attempted such an escape. The 70 escapees who survived that night were taken in by farmers in Haute-Marne. Most of them returned to fight in the ranks of the FFI.

This was the case for the Lévy brothers. Their carriage was finally ready for escape. Raymond jumped in first, then Claude. “Dad tells me he was going to be terrified because when he jumped, he called for his brother, and his brother didn’t answer, and that was his absolute panic. Then he went back along the tracks to find Claude, who had fallen into a thorn bush.”

“The last one, Marc Brafman, told me. He had orders, and he was the oldest. He was 25, the oldest, and the last one to jump. And when he jumped, the others were already gone. Then the train stopped. He saw a guy from the escort with a flashlight and a machine gun. They beat him. He passed out. They put him back on the train. He woke up in Dachau.”

The train finally arrived in Dachau on August 28, 1944, after 57 days of agony. For the survivors of this tragic odyssey, the hell of the ghost train was now followed by the hell of the extermination camps. In addition to the deportation of Jews, 70,000 resistance fighters and political prisoners, like those on the ghost train, were deported from France to the Nazi camps.

We don’t know exactly how many people were deported.

We don’t know the exact number of people deported on the ghost train because we don’t have the departure list for this convoy. We also don’t know the exact number of refugees, but we do know they were very numerous. Extraordinary! More than 160, without a doubt, escaped from this ghost train. However, we do have the registration list of those deported who arrived in Dachau at the end of August 1944.

“I found many details, everything is recorded, it’s incredible. For example, Georges Bonnac, a prominent member of the Resistance. It was August 1944, the Allies arrived. But the bureaucracy was working. Noses, mouths, small ears, everything was noted. 1944. In Dachau.” The Nazis continued their inhumane work until the very end.

Vichy France collaborated until the very end. A final convoy even left the country in November 1944. As for the ghost train, it traversed France for almost two months, and its story was almost forgotten. We now know that 536 resistance fighters arrived in Dachau from this crazy train. Half of them never returned.