Transport Bk, Train Da 226 from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Maly Trostenets, Camp, Belorussia (USSR) on 08/09/1942

The transport orders were handed to the camp commander, Siegfried Seidl from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) in Prague, who passed them on to the Jewish leadership of the ghetto (Ältestenrat). Transport Bk left Theresienstadt on September 9, 1942 for Minsk in Belarus with 1,000 Jews on board. It was the fourth 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. The 207th Daily Order of the Jewish Council (Ältestenrat) of September 4, 1942, reported that a transport designated Bk would depart “for the East” (nach dem Osten) on Tuesday September 8, 1942. According to the timetable for "special trains" (Sonderzüge), this train was originally scheduled to depart a day earlier. The schedule for “special train for migrants (Umsiedler), harvest workforce and Jews” for the period between August 8 and October 30 had been set at the meeting of the Eastern General Operations Board (GBL, Generalbetriebsleitungen Ost) on August 6, 1942, in Frankfurt am Main. The reason for the change to the schedule is unknown....