Transport 473 from Glowno, Camp, Poland to Neuendorf, Camp, Germany on 02/04/1940

The first transport scheduled to leave Glowno was named "Judentransportgruppe No. 473" (Jewish transport group No. 473). It consisted of 18 families with a total of 65 men, women and children ranging in age from 2‒60.The train left on Tuesday, April 2, 1940, at 6:45 a.m. headed for Landwerk Neuendorf im Sande in the province of Brandenburg, approximatively 80 km southeast of Berlin. Neuendorf had been one of 12 villages in the municipality of Steinhöfel. It was initially a Jewish-owned farm, opened in 1932 by the Verein Jüdische Arbeitshilfe (Society for Jewish Labor Help) to provide work and skills for unemployed Jews prior to their immigration to Palestine. It was therefore called a Hachshara camp (“Hachshara,” in Hebrew, means preparation for a Zionist pioneer training camp). It was later transformed by the Nazis into a forced-labor camp.

The deportees traveled an estimated 4‒5 hours via Poznań, Frankfurt/Oder to Fürstenwalde/Spree and were transferred from there either by bus or by truck to the camp. They joined 104 Jews from Schneidemühl who had been deported directly from their hometown to Neuendorf on February 22. The 180‒200 inmates of Neuendorf were mostly assigned to forced farming labor, or to work on the railways or in factories nearby. Most of the inmates were deported to the Warsaw ghetto or to Auschwitz; a few were sent to Theresienstadt. Those who went to the Warsaw ghetto were deported shortly before Passover in March 1942. The deportees who initially survived were likely gassed in Treblinka. Another group was deported a year later, on April 19, 1943 (again, on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday) to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. There are no known survivors from Judentransportgruppe 473.