Transport XII/5 Ez from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 11/1943

On the night of October 4–5, 1943, the Reichsvereinigung building at Hermesweg 5–7 was bombarded from the air and set ablaze. Until then, it had also served as the assembly point for Jews who were designated for deportation. Consequently, the Reichsvereinigung offices moved to 18 Ostendstraße, where the Gestapo set up a communal Jewish residence on March 15, 1943. This residence served both as a detention center and the collection point for Jews prior to deportation.
In November 1943, a transport departed from Frankfurt am Main and reached Theresienstadt on November 10. Although we have no information about the exact date of departure, it presumably left on the previous day because the deportees were sent out on a regular passenger train. The transport comprised of three Jewish females including three-year-old Gerda Tana Siegel. Gerda, who had been defined as a mischling, was taken from her mother who had been married to a Jew and sent alone with two women whom she did not know. In the ghetto, she was placed in an orphanage run by a Jewish couple who had been deported from Vienna. After the couple was sent to Auschwitz, an elderly Jewish woman from Vienna took responsibility for Gerda’s care. For more than a year the woman hid Gerda in a cellar to save her from the transports to Auschwitz. After the war, Gerda, by then five years old, was returned to her mother who had remained in Frankfurt.
Hedwig Reihs was also included in this transport. She was sent to Theresienstadt and not to an extermination camp because her son, a half-Jew, had served in the Wehrmacht and was killed in action in France on June 19, 1940. After the war, in a trial against members of the Gestapo from Frankfurt am Main, she testified that Kriminalinspektor Hans Gabbush and Kriminalsekretär Albert Friedrich had overseen the transport that had left the Jewish residence on Ostendstraße that day. Afterwards, they had gone to the railroad station to make sure that the three Jewish females had boarded the train....