“If God existed, he would not have allowed this”

With A Plea for Peace, Simon Gronowski (94), one of the last Belgian survivors of the Holocaust, addresses young people directly. In a clear and accessible book, he brings together his life story and his deeply held conviction that hope, humanity, and democracy must have the final word. Despite the unspeakable violence he experienced as a child, Gronowski refuses to view the world through a lens of hatred or revenge.

At the age of eleven, he jumped from the 20th convoy bound for Auschwitz, becoming the only child of that age to escape a death transport. His mother and sister did not survive the Holocaust. For sixty years, he remained silent about his past, until he felt that bearing witness had become necessary as a barrier against denial and repetition. His first book, The Child of the 20th Convoy, was a meticulous and confronting reconstruction. A Plea for Peace is different: shorter, lighter in tone, and deliberately written for a younger generation.

What makes his story exceptional is not only his escape, but also his choice of forgiveness. Years later, a former Nazi guard asked him for forgiveness. Gronowski granted it spontaneously, not to erase the past, but to free both himself and the other from lasting guilt and anger. This attitude defines his life philosophy: acknowledging evil without writing off humanity.

After the war, he lost his faith in God. When it became clear that his mother and sister would never return, he concluded that an all-powerful God could not have allowed this. He became an atheist without bitterness and without judgment toward believers. What remained was his faith in humanity, especially in young people and in their ability to learn from the past.

He speaks about contemporary conflicts with the same moral clarity. In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he does not side with flags or camps, but with the victims. Every child’s life is of equal value, he insists. His plea is both simple and radical: equal rights, democracy, and an immediate ceasefire.

Today, Simon Gronowski tirelessly visits schools and gives lectures, not with a message of sorrow, but of hope. Life is beautiful, he says, despite everything. And as if words alone were not enough, he often ends his story at the piano, playing What a Wonderful World. A song that captures his conviction: even after the darkest chapters, trust in the future remains an act of resistance.

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