Transport 60 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 07/10/1943

Between September 18 and October 6, seven transports with a total of 750 Jews departed from Nice to Drancy, doubling the numbers of inmates in the camp, which totaled 650 in early September. Aside from these, 550 more Jews were sent to Drancy after being arrested in Paris and in other cities such as Lyon, Marseille, and Vichy. On October 3, 1,857 Jews were incarcerated in Drancy. Charles Palant who was arrested in Lyon in August 1943, testified as follows: “We learned that deportation transports were leaving every week or two […] but where to, and who was next? We could not have known […]. We only knew one thing: the transport was headed to "Pitchipoi", a mystical name in the language of the camp inmates […] Pitchipoi, the capital of the Unknown.” In the early morning of October 7, the Jews were transported to the railway station in Bobigny using a convoy of buses. In his memoirs Paul Steinberg describes how they boarded the train: “The first ones squeezed against the car walls, frantically holding on to their luggage […] a corner was set apart for us to relieve ourselves with a tub concealed by a blanket. We still tried to maintain a semblance of decorum. The train stood there for hours. I remember a distinguished elderly couple there. I think the man was a diamond merchant. They were arrested in Nice. Before the war, he used to travel in First Class cars and in its sleeping compartments. I believe he never traveled second class, and he said that in life, it is better to move from one extremism to the other [rather than remain in the middle] […] When they sealed off our car with a diagonally placed iron bar, we felt detached from the world.”...