Forget press reports claiming Brussels’ fifth-most-visited museum, Train World, is suffering declining attendance. With over a million visitors since its 2015 opening, flocking to see railway history and the trains themselves – including the oldest preserved locomotive in Europe, the ‘Pays de Waes’ (built 1844), its new exhibition ‘Belgian Railways under Occupation: Between Collaboration and Resistance’ has attracted 6,000 visitors in its first two weeks alone, Train World director Thierry Denuit tells Travel Tomorrow.
A visit to this absorbing exhibition shows why this is so. From the menacing music in the vast opening train hall to the fascinating film with original 1930s and 1940s footage just before you leave, the overriding question is the same. Between 1941 and 1944, records indicate that Belgium’s train operator, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belges (SNCB), transported at least 25,490 Jews and 353 Roma to concentration camps. Some 189,542 Belgian forced labourers and 16,081 political prisoners were also taken east. But could train workers have prevented this happening?
“During the German occupation, the SNCB continued to run trains in the interest of the country and, despite internal resistance, also participated in the deportations to Germany and the camps, which exposes a deep moral dilemma between collaboration and resistance,” the train museum’s website states.
Denuit argues that Narcisse Rulot (1883-1978), appointed director general of the SNCB in 1933, felt he did not have another option. Moreover, the deportations were not even talked about at SNCB board meetings: “Trains continued circulating during World War II, because the SNCB continued carrying out its essential role for the Belgian economy and the provision of food to the Belgian population,” Denuit said. “In doing so, the SNCB was forced under Nazi occupation to also carry out military transports for the Germans, among which deportation trains of forced labourers, political prisoners, Jews and Roma.”
On 22 June 1940, only a few weeks after Belgium surrendered to Germany on 28 May 1940, Rulot said railway workers must return to work to ensure Belgian services continued and people were fed. Staff felt they did not have a choice, especially in difficult wartime conditions. They needed to keep earning and feed their families. And stopping the deportation trains was not the main priority of the resistance workers, Denuit said. This was mainly “countering the German effort to shorten the war”.
The two key exceptions played a central role in the exhibition. The first was the stopping of the 20th deportation convoy, carried out by three young resistance fighters. Secondly, there was the famous ‘phantom train’. This was meant, on 3 September 1944, to transport people from Saint-Gilles prison to concentration camps in Germany. But, because of sabotage acts, it only shunted 30 kilometres from Brussels before being ordered to return by the Allies, saving 1,500 political prisoners from deportation.
The exhibition uses original photographs, artefacts, clothes, maps, and even prisoners’ journals to detail the SNCB’s biggest challenge in its history, with some sections detailed in the trains themselves. Personal highlights are the photograph of a seemingly endless line of Belgian forced labourers waiting outside Etterbeek station to board a train to Germany to help the Nazi economy run, for example, to work in factories; the poster proclaiming ‘Daddy’s help in Germany has allowed Saint Nicolas to visit’; and a basic “sabotage manual” used by SNCB resistance fighters.
There are poignant testimonies of some of the Jewish and Roma families who perished in the camps. But Denuit said the museum chose not to display the harrowing photos of concentration camp inmates, mainly as: “We wanted to make the exhibition as accessible as possible for young people.”
Indeed, to align with SNCB’s commemorative actions following the January 2025 Groupe des Sages report recommendations regarding ‘truth, transmission and reparation’, Denuit stated free access to the exhibition for the under-18s was important. The museum also features extensive information about the SNCB’s role in the war on its website, with the exhibition’s accompanying programme including talks by Holocaust survivors and World War II experts and myriad educational activities for children and schools.
Belgian Railways Under Occupation – Between Collaboration and Resistance. Until 28 June 2026. Train World, Prinses Elisabethplein 5, 1030 Schaerbeek. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10.00 to 17.00, last entry 15.30.
