Only a handful of Jews remained in Denmark following the three transports to Theresienstadt in October 1943. A fourth transport, on November 23, took six women and four children to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, north of Berlin, the main women’s camp in Germany.[1] Also on this transport were four non-Jewish women, classified as political prisoners.[2] In addition to the women and children, the same train carried thirty-six men – nine Jews and twenty-seven non-Jews – to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, some 50 kilometers south of Ravensbrück.[3] The youngest deportee in this transport was two-year-old Ib Katznelson (born October 30, 1941) who was deported together with his mother, Karen Katznelson, and the oldest was Karen Hoffgaard, aged forty-seven (born September 12, 1896.
On the morning of November 23, the Jewish deportees, who were incarcerated in the Horserød internment camp, some 8 kilometers west of Helsingør (Elsinore) in Northern Zealand, were told to gather their belongings and be ready to leave that evening. They were told by the German authorities that their destination was Theresienstadt.[4] At 9-10 P.M., the men, women and children were taken in cars from Horserød to the train station in Helsingør. From there, a regular, second-class passenger train took them, via Copenhagen Central Station, to nearby Vestre Prison (Vestre Fængsel).[5] The thirty-one non-Jewish deportees were herded onto the train at the prison, bringing the total number of deportees in the transport, together with the nineteen Jews, to fifty.[6] The two groups were placed in separate cars.
From Vestre Prison the train headed west toward Roskilde, before turning south on the way to Gedser, a port town on the Baltic Sea. As the train slowed down near Roskilde, three Jewish men – Walter London, Gerhard Löb and Heller (first name unknown) – climbed out the window, jumped off, and afterward reached Sweden and safety.[7] At Gedser the train drove onto a train ferry,[8] which crossed the Baltic Sea, a distance of about 60 kilometers, docking in Warnemünde in northern Germany. There the deportees were loaded onto a third-class passenger train of the German Reichsbahn, which arrived in Fürstenberg, about 100 kilometers north of Berlin, in the early hours of November 25....