Transport from Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 17/03/1943

The second transport from Thessaloniki included around 2,800 Jews. These Jews had been transferred to the Baron Hirsch ghetto on the previous days from two other ghettos: the Aghia Paraskevi ghetto and the ghetto of La Petite Gare, located next to the Baron Hirsch Ghetto. The transport left on March 17, 1943. The deportees were allowed to carry a certain amount of Polish zlotys that they purchased in exchange for Greek drachmas. They were strictly forbidden to carry gold, other currencies, or precious stones. The tickets, paid for by liquidating their own property, were delivered to the Jews by functionaries of the Greek State Railways which dispatched the trains from Greece. Albert Rosa who was on this transport remembers the Germans taking all their belongings from the deportees and giving them a piece of paper in exchange stamped with their value in Reichmarks. They were told they would receive this amount when they would arrive in Poland. "We were taken by truck to the train station; 80-90 people were placed in each cattle car. There was one bucket of water in the corner. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom and there was only a little window; everybody had to fight to get to the window to breathe some air. Only those near the water knew it was there". The transport followed the route from Thessaloniki to Belgrade, then to Zaghreb, to Vienna and Auschwitz. The train reached Auschwitz on March 24. "When we arrived in Auschwitz and got down from the wagons we landed in snow up to our knees. We weren’t used to it and people started freezing to death”, recalls Albert Rosa. The train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 24, 1943. According to Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle, out of the approximately 2,800 deportees that were taken out of the cars, 584 men were selected to enter the camp and tattooed with the numbers 109896-110479, and 230 women were tattooed with the numbers 38962-39191. The remaining 1,986 were immediately gassed and cremated.