Transport Ej from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Bergen Belsen, Camp, Germany on 27/09/1944

On September 21, 1944, Paul Eppstein, head of the Jewish Administration (Ältestenrat) in the Theresienstadt ghetto, announced that 5,000 men were soon to be sent away. This was in effect the beginning of the largest wave of expulsions from Theresienstadt: between September 28 and October 28, 1944. During this period 11 transports with a total of 18,402 inmates left the Theresienstadt ghetto for the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. On September 27, one day before the first of these transports left Theresienstadt, a separate transport designated "Ej" consisting of 20 Jews left Theresienstadt for Bergen-Belsen. Willy Mahler, who worked for the transport department at the Theresienstadt ghetto, indicated in his diary that these were holders of immigration papers to neutral states. It is likely that the Nazi authorities considered them to have some value in possible exchange deals with those countries, and so preferred to send them to Bergen-Belsen, where other holders of such papers were interned, rather than to Auschwitz like other ghetto inmates. The transport was probably conducted by means of a single railway car which was attached to a regular train at the Bohusovice (Bauschowitz) station, some 3km from the Theresienstadt ghetto. According to the camp diary of Abel J. Herzberg, the transport arrived at Bergen-Belsen on the night between September 29 and September 30. He describes their arrival as follows:...