Transport AAx left Theresienstadt on July 14, 1942 for Minsk in Belarus with 1,000 Jews on board. It was the first deportation to leave the ghetto for this destination after a moratorium that had lasted several months. Unlike the previous transports which had been bound for the Minsk ghetto, from now on the Jews were taken directly to the village of Maly Trostenets, 15 kilometers southeast of Minsk. A Soviet kolkhoz (collective settlement) was located near this village, where SS forces carried out the mass murders of Jews. In all, 65,000 Jews were murdered in Maly Trostenets and 200,000 met the same fate throughout the region. They had come from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, as well as the nearby Minsk ghetto. According to historian Tomáš Fedorovič, the transports from Theresienstadt to the East usually included Jews who had resided in the ghetto for a short while. Therefore, most of the deportees in the six deportations from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets and Baranowicze between between July and September 1942 were originally from the Protectorate, from Kolin, Olomouc (Olmütz) and Prague, whereas only 64 Jews were from Germany and Austria. Fedorovič also claims that 239 Jewish mental patients were brought earlier from Prague and Kroměříž to the Cavalier Barracks (Kavalierkaserne) in Theresienstadt. These mental patients, who constituted over one half of the mental patient population in Theresienstadt, were deported on this transport, and made up 11% of the deportees....