Transport from Breslau, Breslau (Breslau), Silesia (Lower), Germany to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 05/12/1943

Prior to the Nazi rise to power, the city of Breslau (Wrocław), in Silesia Province (Śląsk), had one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany, with 19,722 members in June, 1933. According to the census of May 17, 1939, this number dwindled to 10,309.^[1] In the summer of 1943, only 600 to 700 Jews were left in Breslau, after several transports conducted by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office, RSHA), shipped thousands of Jewish men, women, and children to Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania, to Theresienstadt (Terezín) in the Czech Republic, and to Izbica (Lubelska) in Poland.^[2]

On December 5, 1943, a transport left Breslau to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex with eleven women onboard.

Prior to the deportation, the deportees had been in prison. One of them, Renate Lasker-Allais (née Lasker), was caught, together with her sister, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (née Lasker), by the Gestapo while trying to escape to Paris. Both young women had been assigned to forced labor in a paper factory in the Zakrzów (German-Sakrau) suburb of Breslau. There they clandestinely helped French fellow forced laborers, among them POWs, escape to France.^[3] Renate Lasker-Allais had been in prison for one and a half years when on December 5, 1943, she was included in the transport for Auschwitz-Birkenau (her sister Anita was taken to Auschwitz already in November 1943)^[4]....