Transport By from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 26/10/1942

The timetables and destinations of the trains were finalized along with other transports from the Reich. According to historian Anika Frankova, this mass deportation to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was the last in a series of 'autumn-transports' which left Theresienstadt in 1942, and it was the first of 25 trains bound directly for Auschwitz. The transport orders were handed to the camp commander 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). In the Daily Order (Tagesbefehl) Nr. 239 dated October 22, 1942, the Jewish Council announced that a transport with 2,000 people would be dispatched to the East ("nach Osten") on October 26 and that notifications would be handed out to the deportees on October 23. The camp commander himself selected the deportees for this transport and denied any possibility to appeal for an exemption. 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....