Transport Ez-St_77 from Praha, Praha Hlavni Mesto, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 30/03/1945

Transport Ez-St_77 set out from Prague for Theresienstadt on March 30, 1945. The designation Ez-St in German denotes a special transport comprised of individuals (Einzelreisende Sondertransport). Those deported in these transports were usually relatives of members of the Jewish leadership in Theresienstadt, Jews who had been arrested by the Gestapo, or Jews who had been taken to Prague from other localities. All we know about this transport is that only two women were on board and both survived. After the transport reached the confines of Theresienstadt, it is known that the deportees spent several hours, and sometimes several days, in an intake area that the ghetto inhabitants called the “Schleuse.” There, SS and Czech police seized all valuables that appeared on a list of contraband. Afterwards they were housed in severely overcrowded barracks. According to the historian H.G. Adler, 3,669 Jews were deported from the Protectorate to Theresienstadt in 1945. Transport Ez-St_77 was the last to depart from the Protectorate for any destination. After it, 2,803 Jews remained in Bohemia and Moravia. On April 6, a week after the transport, a second Red Cross mission visited Theresienstadt, and on May 5 the Red Cross took over the administration of the camp. On April 20, 1945, however, survivors of death marches from concentration and extermination camps, including Buchenwald, Hannover, and Auschwitz began to reach Theresienstadt—more than 13,000 in all. Some contracted typhus and the disease became an epidemic in which more than 2,000 fell ill and 500 died.