Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Holocaust Survivor Pulled From Car — Seconds Before Train Hits

A 93-year-old Holocaust survivor was saved by the quick actions of good Samaritans after he was pulled from his car seconds before a train collided with it on Tuesday, Fox News reported. Henry Flescher had become stuck on train tracks in Miami-Dade County after taking a curve too fast. He then realized there was a freight train heading straight at him.

“And then the train is coming, and I couldn’t get out,” Flescher said.

Onlookers noticed the car stuck on the tracks, and leapt into action. Minutes after extricating Flescher from the car, the train collided with it with a sickening crunch of twisted metal.

“It was literally about one or two minutes before he was pulled out of the car that the train came,” said one woman who caught the scene on video with her phone. “It was definitely a miracle that he was pulled out in time.”

Flescher answered questions about his experience in the Holocaust in an Ask Me Anything interview session on the website Reddit last year.

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.

The Forward is free to read but not free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make your Passover gift today!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.