Transport Aa from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin, Poland on 11/03/1942

The transport orders were handed to the commander of ghetto Theresienstadt (Terezín), Siegfried Seidl from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Prague, who passed them on to the Jewish leadership of the ghetto (Ältestenrat). The Jewish Council announced in the Daily Order (Tagesbefehl) Nr. 67 on March 5, 1942, that on March 11, a transport with 1,000 people would be dispatched to the East ("nach Osten"). This is confirmed by Egon (Gonda) Redlich, head of the Children and Youth Department in the ghetto who noted in his Ghetto diary on March 6: "A new transport list was issued today [...] the transport to the East will depart at 11 o'clock." Certain groups were eligible for exemption and could apply by March 7 at 6:00 pm. – These included families, which otherwise would be torn apart, people above 65 years of age, veterans of WWI, Jews married to Non-Jews, or those with foreign citizenship. The Jewish leadership had to decide on the exemptions as Redlich wrote in his diary on March 8: "Every day we try by administrative means to exempt children from the transport […]. We worked till midnight." On March 8, the final notifications were handed out to the deportees. This transport consisted mainly of able-bodied men and women including a group of female inmates who had been collectively punished for a parcel which had been smuggled into their room. The transport, designated “Aa”, departed from Theresienstadt on March 11, 1942. It was the third transport to leave Theresienstadt and the first destined for the Lublin District in the General Government. At least 1,003 Theresienstadt inmates were on board including 597 men, 387 women and 19 children. The train's destination was the transit ghetto Izbica, southeast of Lublin. Each inmate scheduled for transport had to report to the quarantine site (“Schleuse”) at the courtyard of the Aussig Barracks, along with his or her luggage. On the day of the transport, the Jews were marched or taken by truck to the Bohusovice (Bauschowitz) train station, some 3 km outside the ghetto, where they were loaded onto the railway cars that were waiting. According to Redlich's diary entry dated March 11, "[...] a mother volunteered for the transport, thinking that her son was in it. In the morning, at the station, she realized that her son was not in the transport." In the same entry, Redlich noted, that it "[...] was impossible for the transport to leave within a few hours as demanded by the Germans." The delay was probably caused by a mistake made by the ghetto-SS itself which merely provided another opportunity for Seidl and his staff to take out their anger on the Jews. From Theresienstadt, the train presumably went north to Dresden, and then east to Breslau (Wroclaw), Posen (Poznan) and Lublin, and finally stopped at Izbica, probably on March 13, two days after departure. In Izbica, the deportees were placed temporarily in the housing of the local Jews who had been murdered in order to make space for new arrivals. Many deportees died in Izbica of starvation, disease, or were murdered. Most of them however were sent on to extermination camps shortly after reaching the transit ghetto, probably to Belzec, which began operating in March 1942. Here they were immediately gassed. Although we are unable to trace any testimonies, according to current research, only seven persons from this transport survived the Holocaust.