James Venture, 93, Dies; Resistance Fighter Survived Nazi Death Train
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Version 0 of 1. James Venture, one of the last survivors of the infamous Train de Loos, which carried French resistance fighters, Communists and Jews from a prison in the northern French village of Loos to concentration camps in Germany in September 1944, died on April 1 at his home in Mons-en-Baroeul, France, near Lille. He was 93. His wife and only immediate survivor, Françoise, confirmed his death. After World War II, Mr. Venture led an organization dedicated to ensuring that other survivors of the train would be cared for and that their experience would not be forgotten. Believed to be the last of the wartime death trains from France, the Loos train carried 871 prisoners packed into a dozen cattle wagons. Some died on the train, some in the camps and some on “death marches” as the Nazis, nearing defeat, cleared the camps. Only about 275 survived the war. Mr. Venture was a Lille police officer working secretly for the resistance. He and his comrades carried out sabotage operations in and around German-occupied Lille, including on a vital railway yard and locomotive works. Detained by the Gestapo in July 1944 as the Allies pushed through northern France toward Lille, Mr. Venture was taken with many others to a roundup point in Loos prison. On Sept. 1, 1944, Mr. Venture was packed onto the train bound for German-occupied Belgium and ultimately to the concentration camps in Germany. The prisoners had hoped the resistance would attack the train and free them, but bickering among the resistance factions allowed the train, guarded by SS troops, to make it through Belgium and on to Germany. Mr. Venture was among those taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, 22 miles north of Berlin, where the Jewish deportees were gassed. On the rail journey, which took several days, French and Belgian Red Cross personnel threw food packages to the deportees, who in turn threw back scraps of paper with their names and addresses. Up to 30 deportees died of hunger or asphyxiation on the train. From Sachsenhausen, Mr. Venture was moved to the camp at Neuengamme, outside Hamburg, and later to Wöbbelin, near Ludwigslust, where he was forced to work on the construction of a new concentration camp. It was from Wöbbelin, on May 2, 1945, that he was liberated. Settling in Mons-en-Baroeul, he dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring that the Loos train deportees — the survivors and the dead — were not forgotten. Until his death, he was president of an organization called Friends of the Deportees of the Loos Train, which helped fellow survivors and created monuments and annual memorials to those from the train who died. By the time of the Allied liberation, the Nazis were believed to have destroyed all records of the Loos train deportees. But many years after the war, a French historian, Yves le Maner, uncovered lists found by the Soviet Red Army forces who took over Sachsenhausen and other camps after the war. With Mr. Venture’s death, eight survivors remain. |