Transport from Luxembourg, Luxembourg to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 28/07/1942

Two days later, another transport set out for Theresienstadt, organized and implemented by Kriminalsekretär Otto Schmalz, head of the Jewish affairs department in the Einsatzkommando (EK) of the Sipo and SD in Luxembourg. The deportation train, reserved from the Reichsbahn (the German railroad company) was composed of freight cars for the deportees and one passenger car for the guard detail: eight members of the Reserve Police Battalion 124. Otto Schmalz informed Alfred Oppenheimer, head of the Luxembourg Ältestenrat der Juden (Jewish council) about the transport who then announced it to the deportees it to conentrated at the assembly point in the Fünfbrunnen monastery. A copy of the deportation list was forwarded to Department IVa of the Civil Administration in Luxembourg (CdZ), which confiscated deportees’ property and and auctioned it off or put it to other use. Deportees were allowed to bring a handbag or backpack, two mattresses, two woollen blankets, eating utensils, 50 Reichsmarks to cover travel expenses, clothing, and eight days’ worth of food. Failure to report for the transport would result in deportation to a concentration camp. This transport, like the one that preceded it, departed from the collection point at the monastery. Between 157 and 159 Jews were aboard, ranging in age from eighty-seven to two years old. Five were patients from the Maison de Sante psychiatric hospital in Ettelbrück who had been declared fit for travel and wre taken on stretchers; twenty-even were patients from convalescent centers in Luxembourg. The deportees appear to have been chosen arbitrarily; the goal was simply to rid various institutions of Jews. Husbands and wives were separated. Ernst Geiershöfer, for example, was deported on this transport, whereas his wife, Irma, was deported on April 6, 1943....