Transport from Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 10/08/1943

The 19th transport from Thessaloniki departed on August 10, 1943. A total of approximately 1,800 Jews were included in this transport. These Jews had been previously selected in late March for forced labour in a work camp near the city of Theva in central Greece. In the trial against the German Consul Fritz Gebhardt von Hahn that took place in Germany on February 19, 1965, Eli Cohen testified to the following: "In March 1943, I was arrested and sent to a labour camp in Greece, in Theva to be precise. In August 1943, they took me back to the Baron Hirsch ghetto in Thessaloniki. After a couple of days, we were brought - men, women and children - to the railway station and loaded into cattle cars." Samuel Arditti who had been brought back from forced labour with a group of about 400 Jews before the deportation recalls the journey: "We left on a Sunday at 5:00. It was very hot. We were crammed into the wagons. I didn’t even have a jacket, I was wearing a short sleeved shirt and shorts. We numbered approximately 470 people, all of whom had come back from forced labour. We were in a terrible state. They placed us in the wagon with chlorine because we were stinking. The transport from Thessaloniki to Poland lasted 10 days, and most died." "We numbered about 80 people in each car" recalls Moshe Halegua. "We had buckets inside the cars for our needs. We emptied them on the way when the train stopped… They gave us one or two pieces of bread. One kilo of bread per person. That's all we had. On the way, Greeks also gave us some bread without which we would have fainted. Unfortunately they could rarely approach the train [...] The trains stopped for hours; they couldn't pass because the lines were occupied," adds Moshe Halegua. The deportees arrived at Auschwitz on August 18. Upon arrival at the camp 271 men were admitted and tattooed with the numbers 136919-137189. The remaining 1,529 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Salamo Arukh, a Greek boxer and middleweight champion in 1938 was one of the deportees on this transport. He remained in Auschwitz and survived by boxing, which provided entertainment for the Nazis in the camp.