Transport 72 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 29/04/1944

The 72nd transport (the 15th that left during the phase supervised by Alois Brunner) departed Paris-Bobigny on April 29, 1944. The deportation list compiled at Drancy comprises 1,000 names. A copy of this list was sent to the Union of French Jews (UGIF). It was recovered by the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine – CDJC) after the war, and edited by Serge Klarsfeld in his memorial to the Jews of France. However, according to Serge Klarsfeld in his book "Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France" (The Calendar of the Persecution of the Jews in France), this transport comprised 1,004 deportees, consisting of 398 men and 606 women. At least 169 deportees had been transferred from camp Vittel to Drancy on April 18. Most of these deportees were Jews from Warsaw, who had reached Vittel on the strength of shady "rescue passports" from South and Central American countries which had been sent to Warsaw from Switzerland. The Nazis sent the holders of these passports to Vittel and held them there, together with American, British and other Allied nationals for possible later prisoner exchange. When the exchange did not materialize, these detainees too were deported. Among them was the poet Itzhak Katzenelson, author of "The Song of the Murdered Jewish People". He had joined the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and was able to escape but was then caught by the Gestapo and sent to Vittel. He managed to bury some of the work he had written in Vittel under a tree in the camp before he and his youngest son, 17 year-old Zwi, were deported to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz. Upon their arrival, both of them were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Dozens of Jewish refugees from Alsace including 27 children under the age of ten were also among the deportees from Vittel. Akadius Dudelzak, born in captivity in the camp, was just three months old and one of the youngest deportees from France....