Transport 1 from Aalborg, Denmark to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 02/10/1943

The first transport to arrive in the Theresienstadt ghetto (Terezín) from Denmark left Aalborg, a large city in Northern Jutland, the country’s northernmost region, by train, on October 2, 1943. The transport consisted of eighty-three Jews rounded up in the country’s more rural areas, in Jutland and on the island of Funen, in central Denmark, during the night between October 1 and 2, 1943, when the Germans and their collaborators tried to round up all the country’s Jews. The youngest deportee was Judith Futerman, aged three (born March 3, 1940), and the oldest was Phillip Michael Hartogsohn, aged 76 (born on April 10,1867).^[1] The largest group in this transport consisted of young Jews mainly from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, who were taking part in the Jugend Aliyah training program to learn farming in Denmark, with the intention to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. They were assigned to different farms around the countryside, in order to gain work experience.

The freight train used for this transport was procured on September 29, 1943, by a Reichsbahnoberrat (semi-high-ranking official) named Claus (first name unknown), who had ordered it in a meeting with representatives of Danish State Railways in the town of Fredericia.^[2] The train consisted of forty freight cars, and one passenger car for the Germans escorting the transport. In fact, only three of the freight cars were used to deport the eighty-three Jews.^[3] (What the other cars were used for is not known.) The deportation was implemented by German police units, some of which had been summoned from Norway, as well as German and Danish SS personnel.^[4]

Most of the Jews who were rounded up on Funen were assembled at Vestre Skole, a school in central Odense, the largest city on Funen.^[5] A photograph, which was only discovered in 1993, shows Jews being assembled by the Germans in the schoolyard of Vestre School in central Odense. The photo was taken at dawn on October 2,1943, by Kristian Wiibroe Lorentzen from his apartment.^[6]...