Transport Es from Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 19/10/1944

The transport orders were handed to the camp commander Karl Rahm by the Office for Settlement of the Jewish Question in Prague. According to Vilem Cantor, who was in charge of the transport registry in Theresienstadt, the commander passed the transport orders to the Jewish Council which was forced to comply. They included the date of the transport and the number of people to be transferred, as well as any special criteria. According to the diary of Camilla Hirsch, these criteria apparently included sick and handicapped people. The orders also included the names of several other people who were to be included in the transport (Weisungen). The Jewish Council then held a meeting of up to 30-40 people who represented the different departments and nationality groups within the ghetto, and a list was finalized. The list also included a reserve amounting to 20% of the transport. If, for some reason, certain inmates could not join the transport, others whose names appeared on the reserve list would be allocated in their stead. On October 18, the inmates on the transport list received a summons, ordering them to report that night to the quarantine site (“Schleuse”) at the Hamburg Barracks as soon as possible. They were allowed to bring only a limited amount of luggage. During quarantine, the Jewish leadership was able to arrange for provisions and supplies, if only intermittently. Later that day, an urgent memorandum was sent to the house and block elders notifying them that boarding had begun. This transport, designated “Es” was the ninth to leave Theresienstadt for Auschwitz in this final wave of 11 such transports. It departed from Theresienstadt on October 19, 1944, and arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 20. On board were 1,500 men, women and children. On the day of the transport an empty train arrived at the camp via the adjoining tracks built by Jewish prisoners in the summer of 1943. The inmates were loaded into overcrowded railway cars. Historian Alfred Gottwaldt suggests that these latter transports from Thereseinstadt to Auschwitz were conducted using two trains of 25-30 freight cars each which went back and forth between the camps. Trains from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz usually went north to Dresden, and then east to Breslau (Wroclaw) and Kattowitz (Katowice)....