What is the moment when the writing of a book begins? I imagine each book springs from a slightly different seed, but often they will come from a conversation or a word.

I was fortunate to come to my latest book, The Nazi Ghost Train, via a very special individual. His name was John Evans and, by the time I got to know him, he was already well into his 80s.

A small, unassuming man, snug in a shirt and tie even when at his home in a village outside Nottingham, England, he had had a remarkable war.

Flying with 158 Squadron out of RAF Lissett in Yorkshire, he piloted a Halifax on bombing missions to prepare the way for D-Day. But on the night of May 12/13, 1944, his aircraft was pounced by night-fighter ace Heinz Wolfgang Schnaufer and was sent down in flames.

John’s parachute had become dislodged from its housing and was lying right on the edge of the open front escape hatch, but he quickly grabbed it, clipped it to his parachute harness, and jumped into the night sky.
Stranded in Occupied Belgium, he obtained the help of an evasion line and remained free until liberation.

And this was where a lot of my conversations with John took us. Whereas my obsession with the Resistance and evasion lines stems from research and reading, John’s came from the fact that these people kept him free.

And there were all sorts of people who risked everything for him, among them an aristocrat, a plumber, a bespectacled widow who kept guns in the eaves of her house, and a family with two teenage children.
After the war John went back to visit them all – or rather, all that had survived.

And he kept photographs, documents, and letters from those relationships in a box at home. Reaching into the box one afternoon, he handed me a letter from Florent Biernaux.

It was written six weeks after the end of the war in Europe. ‘I hope you will remember your stay in Hasselt at my home,’ Florent wrote. ‘I will tell you our adventure in a few words.’

After helping John and about sixty other airmen, Florent and his family had been arrested and sent to the ‘big prison’ of Saint-Gilles in Brussels. His wife, Olympe, teenage son, Raymond, and young daughter, Eliane, were all sent to concentration camps, but ‘I alone remain to Brussel, with 1,500 other men and women to be shot’.
But, he added, ‘On account of sabotage… we were liberated.’

Confused, I asked John what Florent meant. How could ‘sabotage’ save what Florent claimed was 1,500 lives?
‘Ah, that was le train fantôme,’ John said. ‘The ghost train.’

It was a deportation bound for Neuengamme concentration camp, he added.

This was the starting moment for a book which would take me through archives in Belgium, Britain, and the United States, to busy railway stations and abandoned halts, to the firing squad post at Breendonk, to a quaint house in the suburbs of Ghent where a man cried when he remembered seeing his father for the last time, and to many other places besides.

Along the way I traced relatives of long-deceased veterans by using information from newspaper obituaries and articles. A letter sent in hope to one airman’s house in Vancouver was rescued by a curious neighbour, as by now the veteran was long gone and his house was ‘vacant and wide open to the breeze’. The neighbour opened the letter and emailed me. It was very kind.

The sadness at finding no family left was lifted slightly by the fact that the neighbour had been so intrigued by my letter she was now researching the pilot – Stuart Leslie – herself.

For me, that was a wonderful moment of connection and shared fascination with the past.

There were more than 40 airmen on the ‘ghost train’. I focussed in on more than a dozen, plus two of the SOE operatives, and many of the men and women of Resistance. Stuart Leslie became one of the stories I told.
Like John, he was a Halifax pilot who was helped by evasion line guides who planned to move him to a forest camp in the Ardennes.

But, unlike John, he never reached the camp and was caught at a checkpoint.

Stuart Leslie was caught in a moment of misfortune; most of the airmen in the train were caught up in an elaborate trap set by Belgian traitor Prosper Dezitter whose work for the German Abwehr stretched back to the beginning of the occupation.

By pretending to help, he ensnared British soldiers left behind after the evacuation at Dunkirk, Jews, airmen, and résistants and their families. Hundreds, perhaps thousands – and he was paid a bounty for each.
A despicable human being, who – despite an SOE plan to assassinate him – remained active right up to the liberation.

Dezitter has intrigued many of the reviewers and people who have interviewed me about The Nazi Ghost Train. But so has one of the heroes: the train driver, Louis Verheggen – an ‘ordinary’ man who had never taken part in act of resistance before. A man who helped saved 1,400 lives and then simply walked back into work the day afterwards and got on with his day job.

Over the years there have been some wonderful researchers – many of whom I have met or corresponded with. But I obtained much of Verheggen’s story from one I never got to meet: Oscar Catherine.
A Belgian-born agent of SOE, he survived Dachau concentration camp and became an historian of the Resistance, taking a particular interest in the ‘Ghost Train’.

Finding his letters and notes in the Belgian archive, CegeSoma, gave me a huge boost. Thank you, Oscar, for your courage during the war and for your service to some unsung heroes afterwards. You have played an essential role in the continuing journey of the ‘ghost train’.

Greg Lewis is a writer with a keen interest in resistance, evasion, and escape, and the author of The Nazi Ghost Train, his most recent book.