Transport 68 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 10/02/1944

The transport departed from the Paris-Bobigny train station on February 10, 1944, with a total of 1,502 deportees, according to the list prepared in the Drancy internment camp before the departure. A copy of this list was sent to the Union of French Jews (Union générale des israélites de France - UGIF), recovered by the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine – CDJC) after the war, and edited by Serge Klarsfeld in his 1978 work titled "Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France". This was an exceptionally long train as it carried many more passengers than the average deportation train. In accordance with Alois Brunner's orders there were many French Jews among the deportees, as was the case for many of the transports in the third phase of the deportations. More than a third of the deportees (560 people) had been born in France. The transport followed the usual deportation route indicated by the German Reich Railway (Deutsche Reichsbahn) to the Gestapo as of November 1943: Paris-Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Epernay, Châlons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar-le-Duc, Novéant-sur-Moselle, Metz, Saarbrücken, Homburg, Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Frankfurt am Main, Fulda, Burghaun, Erfurt, Apolda, Weißenfels, Engelsdorf Mitte (Leipzig), Wurzen, Dresden, Görlitz, Kohlfurt, Arnsdorf, Königszelt, Kamenz (Niederschlesien), Neisse, Cosel, Heydebreck, Katowice, Mysłowice, Auschwitz. The train was handled by SNCF engineers and conductors until the new Franco-German border in Novéant-sur-Moselle, which had been renamed Neuburg an der Mosel after Hitler annexed Alsace-Lorraine. In Neuburg, they were replaced by German railway workers from the Reichsbahn. The next stop was Metz, located in the territory annexed by the Germans. The train then ran along the southern border between Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Görlitz, an entry point into the former province of Silesia. The transport continued to the railway hub in Kohlfurt (Wegliniec) and from there further south via Heydebreck, the former Kandrzin (Kędzierzyn) into the south-eastern end of the Reich until it reached occupied Polish Silesia in Katowice (Kattowitz) which served as the capital of the newly created East Upper Silesia. Auschwitz-Birkenau, just 40 km south of Katowice was part of it and, as Katowice, annexed to the Reich. Transport 68 arrived at Auschwitz on February 13, 1944. A total of 210 men (serial numbers 173708 to 173917) and 61 women (serial numbers 75340–75400) were selected for slave labour. The remainder of 1,229 deportees were gassed immediately upon arrival.