Transport Ab from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin, Poland on 17/03/1942

The transport orders were handed from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Prague to the commander of ghetto Theresienstadt (Terezín), Siegfried Seidl, who passed them on to the Jewish leadership (Ältestenrat). The Jewish Council announced this transport in the Daily Order Nr. 71 (Tagesbefehl), on March 10, 1942, one day before the previous transport to Izbica left. On Mach 17, a transport with 1,000 people would be dispatched to the East ("nach Osten"), notifications would be given out on March 11 and 12. Certain groups were eligible for exemption and could apply by until March 12 at 6:00 p.m. 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 transport, designated “Ab”, departed from Theresienstadt on March 17, 1942. It was the fourth transport to leave Theresienstadt and the second destined for the Lublin District in the General Government. Up to 1,080 Theresienstadt inmates were on board including 710 women. 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. Egon (Gonda) Redlich, head of the Children and Youth Department in the ghetto, wrote in his Ghetto diary on March 17: "The second transport left for the East. The people travel in cattle cars." Karel Reinisch, born 1909, who was on board of this transport and survived by escaping from Izbica, recalled in his post-war testimony: "Then they transported us to Poland. More than a thousand people were squeezed in that train. We travelled for three days and were discharged in Izbica." 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 19 or 20. As Gottwaldt suggests, after arriving in Izbica, around 1,000 Jews from this and the previous transport were immediately taken further to Krasnyczin and Gorzkow. The others were placed temporarily in the housing of the local Jews who had been murdered prior to their arrival. 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 camp, probably to Belzec, which began operating on March 17, 1942, the day of the deportees' departure from the ghetto. Here they were immediately gassed. According to our research only three persons from this transport survived the Holocaust.