Transport 73 from Drancy, Camp, France to Tallinn, Harjumaa, Estonia on 15/05/1944

This transport (the 16th that left during the phase supervised by Alois Brunner) departed Paris-Bobigny on May 15, 1944. The deportation list, compiled at Drancy comprises 878 names. Many deportees were Jews arrested during raids in Paris, Limoges, Nice and Rodez. Some were French citizens others were refugees from various parts of Europe. A copy of this list was sent to the UGIF. It was recovered by the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine – CDJC) after the war, and edited by Serge Klarsfeld in his memorial to the Jews of France (Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France) from 1978. Originally, as stated in Klarsfeld's "Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France" which based its information on the CDJC archive, it was believed that this transport was sent to Auschwitz. However, it comprised only able bodied men. 38 deportees were minors, the youngest, Maurice Gattegno from Nice was not even 12. During the formation of this transport, the camp administration circulated information that the deportees would be sent to construction sites belonging to the civil engineering group Todt Organization (Organisation Todt - OT). As early as April, Alois Brunner and Ernst Brückler had held inspections in the camp and had forced some younger inmates to physically exercise in order to have a selection of athletic and able bodied men for this purpose Since the Germans had also launched a call for volunteers, some of the detainees in Drancy committed spontaneously. One was Guy Sarner from Marseille who had been arrested on March 27, 1944. He was just 16 at the time. He recalls in his post war testimony: "We thought that this transport was destined for the Todt Organization and that the outcome would be better than all those transports that consisted of numerous people unfit for work. I cheated on my age so that I could participate." However, in reality this train was directed to the detention centers and killing sites in Lithuania and Estonia. It is the only transport from France that was sent to the Baltic States. The reason for this destination is still not known. One credible hypothesis is that in light of the advancing Soviets the Nazis needed labor to erase the traces of their crimes, and burn the bodies in mass graves. The fate of this transport was not known for a long time. Only in the mid 90s, the discovery of the inscription "We are 900 French" on a wall of the Ninth Fort in Kaunas (Kovno) prompted new research for traces and testimonies....