BRUSSELS – Simon Gronowski had committed many acts of bravery and generosity in his 89 years of life, and opening a window in April wouldn't ordinarily have counted among them, but this was no ordinary April.
It was the height of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, which hit Belgium as hard as anyplace in the world. But as a Holocaust survivor, Gronowski had faced death more intimately before.
The diminutive lawyer summoned his courage, moved his electric piano to beneath a windowsill and flung the window open, letting in the thick, wary quiet of a city terrified of the virus. And he began to tap out a jazz tune.
Soon, his neighbors popped their heads out of their windows, some even donning masks and walking up to his house to hear better.
Gronowski had meant for his impromptu concerts to make people happy, but playing for others has also had intrinsic value for him his entire life. "Music is a means of communication, of connection," he said.
Gronowski taught himself how to play the piano as a teenager because he, too, was seeking to communicate, to connect — first and foremost with his older sister, Ita, who had perished in Auschwitz in 1943 at age 19.
"I adored her," he said. "She was a brilliant pianist."
Gronowski's first act of bravery took place many Aprils ago, when an altogether different kind of calamity was gripping Europe.
On April 19, 1943, when he was 11, Gronowski jumped out of a speeding train.
He and his mother were packed with dozens of others in a cattle wagon on the deadly route from Mechelen, a town where Belgian Jews were rounded up, to Auschwitz.
Of all the trains to doom, Gronowski's became especially etched in Holocaust history. Known as "Convoy 20," it was disrupted by three resistance fighters soon after departing Mechelen. In the commotion, dozens got a chance to escape into the farmlands of Flanders.
Soon after the train started accelerating again, Gronowski's mother, perhaps emboldened by the incident and the glimmer of hope, urged him to jump off.
"I jumped because I listened to my mother's orders," Gronowski said. His mother did not follow.
"If I had known she was not going to jump, I would have stayed on the train," he said.
For the next 17 months, the boy was hidden in the attics of some Catholic families. After Brussels was liberated in September 1944, he reunited with his ailing father, who had been in and out of the hospital for years, and eventually succumbed — to a broken heart, Gronowski believes — leaving the boy an orphan the following year.
Gronowski drew on the memories of prolonged confinement, the fear and desperate sadness of the 1940s, in a newspaper column he wrote as encouragement for fellow Belgians in March as they struggled to settle into lockdown.
For six decades, he said little about his parents, his beloved sister, Ita, or that day he jumped off a moving train on its way to Auschwitz.
"It was not a secret, but I did not talk about it," he said. "Why? Because I was feeling guilty. Why are they dead, and I am alive?"
All that changed in 2002, when, pressured by friends who knew his story, he decided to take on the past.
"I needed to bear witness and write my story," he said. Then, he started giving lectures, especially at schools.
"It was very painful to stir it all up again," he said. "But now I feel that I am bringing something positive to young people, and it makes me happy. I am liberated."
