Transport Ds from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 18/12/1943

This transport was announced in the Daily Orders issued by the Jewish Council on December 17, 1943, which stated that it would be going into Reich territory. This was well after the final preparations for the transport had begun. Early in the morning the day before, the inmates received written notice ordering them to report to the assembly site, the “Schleuse” located at the Hamburg Barrack, on the day of the transport. The notice stated that appeal was impossible. Aside for carry-on luggage, the inmates were allowed to bring one single bag or suitcase per person, which would be delivered separately to the train station. The inmates, who had received identification numbers upon their deportation to Theresienstadt, were now given new ones. After they were counted, they were taken to the Theresienstadt train platform, recently constructed by Jewish labourers, where they were loaded onto the waiting train. This transport, designated “Dr”, left Theresienstadt on December 18, 1943, and was the second of two transports that left Theresienstadt right before the temporary closure of the railway tracks in the winter of 1943. On board were 2,503 men, women and children, most of them under the age of 60. It arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau the next day, on December 19. The trains from Theresienstadts to Auschwitz went north to Dresden, and then east to Breslau (Wroclaw) and Kattowitz (Katowice). Unlike most incoming transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the inmates of this transport did not undergo selection, and none of them were murdered immediately upon arrival. Instead, they were ordered to surrender their luggage and were taken the so-called ‘Sauna’, where they were shaved and tattooed with prisoner numbers. They were then taken to a separate, fenced-off section of Birkenau which received the designation “Familienlager (Family Camp) B II b”, together with thousands of Theresienstadt inmates who had arrived there in September 1943. The exact purpose of the Family Camp has not been ascertained. Rudolf Höss, commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, claimed before the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946 that the Family Camp was meant to quell the fears of the inmates remaining in Theresienstadt of the fate that awaited them in the East. However, evidence presented by historian Otto Dov Kulka suggests that the Family Camp was meant to be used as a façade to showcase fair treatment of the Jews to foreign delegations (including representatives of the Danish government and the International Red Cross) who might wish to inspect Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such was the case with the ongoing endeavour to use Theresienstadt as a convincing illusion of normalcy in order to mislead the Red Cross. In the Family Camp, which was the only place in Auschwitz were young children were allowed to live, the adults did their best to maintain a normal environment for them....