Transport 8, Train Da 44 from Berlin, Berlin (Berlin), City of Berlin, Germany to Riga, Ghetto, Latvia on 13/01/1942

On January 13 all deportees were taken from the assembly camp to Grunewald station. Those unable to walk were taken there by truck while the others were made to walk about seven kilometres across the city. At the station third-class passenger cars ordered by the Gestapo and supplied by the Reichsbahn awaited them and the deportees were ordered to board the train which was designated Da 44. This transport departed on the same day. It was the eighth out of over 60 transports to the East (Osttransporte) which together took more than 35,000 Jews from Berlin to ghettos and extermination sites in Eastern Europe. It consisted of 1,034 men, women and children who mostly came from the city itself, but also 44 Jews from Potsdam and about 15 Jews who until then had been imprisoned also found themselves on this transport. The average age of the deportees was 60 but there were also 15 children up to 15 years of age. During the journey the Jews were guarded by a guard detail from the Schupo police. Their destination was not disclosed and after three days in overcrowded cars, they arrived on January 16 in severe frost at Skirotava station on the outskirts of Riga. After disembarking the train, they were informed that their luggage would be transferred to their future homes in the ghetto.
The truth was that not all of them would arrive at the ghetto at all and neither would their luggage. Some of the deportees were selected and suffocated in gas trucks or brought to the forest of Rumbula and shot. At the beginning of February and April 1942, 4,400 of those who made it to the ghetto were also selected and killed during Operation Duenamuende (Aktion Dünamünde). The remaining inmates had to work under impossible conditions as forced labourers. In the fall of 1943, the order was given to liquidate the ghetto. Between 2,000 and 2,500 of the inmates most of them either children, elderly, or sick, were taken by train to Auschwitz where most were murdered immediately after arrival. From August of 1944, any Jews remaining were transferred to Stutthof concentration camp from where the majority were sent to forced labour camps in the Reich.
An Einsatzkommando report dated February 2, 1942 described in general terms what happened to the Jewish deportees from German territory:...