Transport from Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 05/04/1943

After the first five transports that departed from Thessaloniki on March 1943, another nine transports left Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1943. On April 5, 1943, the seventh transport departed from Thessaloniki. Around 2,800 Jews were included in this transport. Ovadia Cohen was among the deportees. He recalls that Rabbi Koretz, the chief rabbi of Thessalonki, had told them to take all their belongings and not to worry: they would not be sent to Krakow. After having remained for some days in the Baron Hirsh ghetto, the deportees were transferred to the neighbouring railway station. Albert Jerassy recalls: “We were like cattle inside, one on top of the other, crowded together. 100 Jews were loaded into cars that were built to transport 20 cows each. There was no water. It smelled horrible. Children were screaming, newborns, one or two year-olds. It was terrible”. The transport arrived in Auschwitz on April 10. “When we got out of the trains we waited in line and there stood one man who said ‘left-right’. At first we didn’t know what this meant. This was the selection that was carried out to decide who would go to the work camp and who would be placed in the wagons that would take them to the gas chambers”, recalls Ovadia Cohen....