Transport XXIII/1 from Danzig, Danzig, Free City of Danzig to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 9/12/1942

This transport departed from Danzig on the evening of December 9, 1942 and arrived at Theresienstadt on December 11, 1942. It was the first of four transports sent from Danzig to Theresienstadt during the years 1942-1944. It consisted of 54 Jews, residents of the building at Milchkannengasse 26, among them 82 year-old Rosa Fürstenberg who had joined the facility the previous month having been evacuated from her apartment in Neustadt after the death of her non-Jewish husband. The majority of the deportees were over 75 years old. The youngest person on the transport was 52 year-old Dora Wolga who worked as a caregiver. The leader of the Jewish community of Danzig, David Jonas, received the deportation orders from the Gestapo. The Gestapo arrived at the buildings at Mausegasse and Milchkannengasse and ordered the residents to get ready for their upcoming deportation. They were allowed to hastily pack some luggage, but upon inspection many pieces of luggage were confiscated and brought later to the Committee for Facilitating Jewish Emigration. The deportees were then loaded into trucks. Presumably they were taken to the Main Train Station (Danzig Hauptbahnhof), and were loaded into a railway car connected to a regular passenger train. The deportees stayed in the car for two days, and eventually arrived at the Bohusovice train station, north of Prague. The deportees were taken off the train and those unable to walk were forced by the awaiting SS personnel and Czech gendarmerie into trucks that took them the approximate 3 kilometers to Theresienstadt; the others were forced to march, carrying their hand luggage....