Transport VIII/2 from Hannover, Hannover (Hannover), Hanover, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 30/06/1943

On May 21, 1943, the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) sent a circular to all Gestapo headquarters in the Reich. It stated that the deportations of eligible Jews to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt should be concluded by June 30. Exemptions from deportation were further reduced. The new guidelines explicitly authorized the Gestapo to include sick and infirm Jews in the transports. In light of the small number of remaining Jews, members of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany and of the local Jewish administration were to be included as well. The guidelines stated that for deportations of less than 400 people, special cars, attached to regular trains, were to be used. This transport, that left Hanover on June 30, 1943, consisted of only nine Jews. Among them was the Cantor and last secretary of the Hanover Jewish community, Samuel Herskovits, who was deported together with his second wife and his three daughters. Prior to his arrest, he had lived in the compound of the Horticultural School in Ahlem, which was used by the Gestapo as assembly camp for the preceding transports. For the remainder, until the end of the war, the administration of the last remnants of the Jewish community consisted of Jews who were still exempt from deportation due to their status as spouses in so-called "Mischehen" (mixed marriages). The Herskovits family was arrested weeks prior to their deportation and kept in prison until then. In her memoirs, his surviving daughter Ruth Herskovits-Gutmann recalls the events preceding the transport: “On a day at the beginning of June 1943, my father came to the field where we were planting cabbage. He asked us to accompany him to the apartment. When we arrived, we encountered Gestapo-men who were waiting for us. “You are under arrest”, they told us and then they took us to the prison in Hanover....