Transport 77 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 31/07/1944

The last mass transport from Drancy left from the Paris-Bobigny railway station on July 31, 1944. The deportation list, compiled at Drancy comprises 1,321 names from 37 countries, among them 330 children under the age of 18. A copy of this list was sent to the Union of French Jews (Union Générale des Israélites de France – 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 1978 work titled "Memorial to the Jews deported from France" (Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France). However, Klarsfeld’s "The Calendar of the Persecution of the Jews in France" (Le calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France) notes that there were only 1,300 deportees. About 800 of these Jews had been interned in Drancy, following mass arrests in Paris in July. The rest came from Lyon and from shelters and children's homes run by the UGIF. The original idea and subsequent initiative to round up children for deportation came from Brunner. The UGIF, an association created by the Nazis to represent the Jewish population before the French and the Occupation authorities, had a liaison office with the Gestapo's Bureau for Jewish Affairs. Kurt Schendel, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin who had immigrated to France directed this office. Immediately following the liberation of Paris on August 31, 1944, he testified that Brunner demanded retribution for an alleged ‘Jewish assassination’ of German officers who were ambushed in their car by the French Resistance: "Brunner explained to me that for him nothing stood above the blood of a German soldier, and that he had decided to arrest the young people in our centers and simultaneously those in the children's homes.... I tried in every possible way to change Brunner's opinion ... finally insisting that it was not an act of courage to lay the blame on little children. I told him that I was 100 percent Jewish and that I was whining to be deported if he would leave the children alone. He countered in his every response that these children were 'future terrorists.' There was nothing to do; it was impossible to move this man; no argument, no sentiment had any sway over him." Maurice Wajdenfeld, an internee at the Drancy satellite camp Austerlitz who was in charge of the pigsty and therefore nicknamed ‘the swineherd’ was brought to Drancy on July 31. He vividly recalls reports regarding the last transport from Drancy as follows:...