Transport 10 from Berlin, Berlin (Berlin), City of Berlin, Germany to Riga, Ghetto, Latvia on 25/01/1942

On January 25 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 covered box cars ordered by the Gestapo and supplied by the Reichsbahn awaited them and the deportees were ordered to board the train. This transport departed the same day. It was the tenth 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 1,044 men, women and children who mostly came from the city itself. There were many residents from different Jewish retirement homes among them. The average age of the deportees was 58, but there were also 23 children under 15 on the transport. During the journey the Jews were guarded by a guard detail from the Schupo police. Their destination was not disclosed and after five days in overcrowded cars, they arrived on January 30 in severe frost at Skirotava station on the outskirts of Riga. Because of the cold in the box cars, many people had frozen to death during the journey. 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, especially the elderly. 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, mostly 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:...