Transport 69 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 07/03/1944

The transport departed from the Paris-Bobigny station on March 7, 1944, with a total of 1,501 deportees, according to the list prepared in the Drancy internment camp. 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". Similar to the Transport 68, this was an exceptionally long train that had many more deportees than the average. Most of the deportees were arrested a month prior to their deportation during the roundups organized by Alois Brunner in the Paris region, the Isère, the Savoie, the Haute-Savoie, Nice, Belfort, Vesoul, Chartres, Orléans, Lyon, Limoges, Marseille, Dijon, and Toulouse. Three days before the departure, those designated for the transport were segregated in the Drancy camp. On the morning of March 7, they received supplementary rations: “On March 7, having received rations for three days, we were loaded 60 per cattle car” (Guy Kohen, Retour d’Auschwitz). 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....