Toward the end of December 1943, the ten Danish Jewish women and children held in the Ravensbrück concentration camp were told that they had to get ready to leave soon.[1] Unlike the vast majority of the detained Danish Jews, who had been sent to Theresienstadt, these Jewish women and children had been deported to Ravensbrück, arriving there on November 26, 1943.[2] Unlike the non-Jewish deportees traveling on the same train, the Jewish women and children never became part of the general camp population. Instead, they were kept together as a group and taken to the Zellenbau (prison) of the Ravensbrück camp.[3] The section they were held in had originally been intended to house prominent political prisoners—but, during their incarceration, there were no other inmates there.[4] After about six weeks, on the evening of January 12, 1944, they finally left Ravensbrück. Two members of the group, Karen Katznelson and her two-year-old son Ib Katznelson, had to stay behind, since Ib had fallen ill with diphtheria and been hospitalized in the camp sickbay.[5] The oldest deportee on the transport was the 47-year-old Karen Hoffgaard (born on September 12, 1896), while the youngest deportee was the three-year-old Olaf Meyer (born on December 16, 1940).[6]
The three women and five children were taken in trucks to the Fürstenberg train station, where, according to Corrie Meyer's statement, they had to wait for 45 minutes before being allowed to board the train. It was a regular passenger train, and it departed at midnight. The women and children were guarded by three plain-clothed SS men.[7] The train arrived in Oranienburg, where the deportees had to change and ride the S-Bahn (suburban railway) to the Anhalter Bahnhof in the center of Berlin. Corrie Meyer relates how strange it was to travel on a regular S-Bahn train: “It was 7 A.M., so everyone was on their way to work. We felt so hopeless, sitting there among all these ordinary people, with no one knowing that we were a 'transport'.”[8]
At the Anhalter Bahnhof, the women and children, still under SS guard, were put on a regular passenger train. It travelled southward via Dresden, arriving at the Bauschowitz (Bohušovice) train station, some 2.5 kilometers from Theresienstadt, at 1 P.M. on January 13, 1944.[9] After alighting at the station, the passengers were picked up by two Jewish prisoners and a Czech gendarme. The women had to walk to Theresienstadt, while the children, together with the deportees' luggage, were driven to the ghetto in a small wagon.[10]...