Transport from Larissa, Larissa, Thessaly, Greece to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 03/04/1944

On March 24, 1944, around 235 of the Jews who had remained in the city were arrested in accordance with the plan that was implemented in many cities of mainland Greece. That year, Passover was to be celebrated on April 8 in accordance with the Hebrew calendar and it was announced that flour for matzah bread would be distributed on Friday March 24. The Jews who went to the flour distribution were arrested and led to a bus parking lot where they were detained and guarded by German guards. On that same day, the Jews of Larissa were joined by others from the neighbouring city of Trikala and a couple of days later by the Jews of Ioannina. The deportees were kept for around ten days inside the closed parking lot. Subsequently they were ordered into trucks that took them to the Larissa railway station. There they boarded freight railway cars which were joined to the train from Athens going north. Friedrich Paulsen, staff member of the Security Police (SiPo) was sent to Larissa at the beginning of November 1943 to establish the Larissa Field Office and served in Volos during the deportation. During the investigation against Walter Blume that took place in Bremen from 1968 until 1971, Paulsen testified that Larissa was, in fact, the assembly point for Jews from different cities. Inside the parking lot, the deportees were detained under harsh conditions. There were no toilets and no place to lie down. They were forced to relinquish any valuables they had brought with them, which were transferred to the Larissa Field Office along with money confiscated from Jews from other cities. Polizei-Oberrat D. Kircher who later became the Head of the Larissa Field Office of the Commander of the Security Policy (BdS) in Athens remembers seeing a "mountain of Greek banknotes" when he entered the Field Office in Larissa. "I asked my deputy what this was and he replied that a short while ago a transport from Athens had passed through Larissa on its way to labour camps in Germany. The train headed north and made one stop on Greek territory, in Thessaloniki. Approximately 763 Jews transported there from the city of Kastoria joined the transport which now numbered 5,200 persons confined in 80 cattle cars. In some cars, the number of deportees reached 100. After a 7-8 day journey, the train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 11. Out of the 235 Jews deported from Larissa, only six people are reported to have survived the concentration camps.