Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 16/07/1942

The second mass deportation that left Westerbork for Auschwitz-Birkenau departed on July 16, 1942. Historian Houwink ten Cate claims that the transport was compiled in a hurry, because a transport from France had not departed as planned and Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was about to visit the extermination camp on July 17 and 18. The deportation list used by the Zentralstelle was copied by representatives of the Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co Bank who worked at Westerbork and who passed it on to Hans Fischböck, General Commissioner for Economic Affairs in the Netherlands to whom the bank was directly accountable. This list reveals that at least 586 men, women and children were deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whole families were on the transport. The youngest deportee, a girl, had just turned six months when she was shipped away. The oldest deportee was born in 1879, which is distinctly above the average age of deportees. Like with the one before, also with this transport many German Jews were deported. As the figure of 600-800 deportees (the information varies) arriving by train from Amsterdam in Westerbork on July 16 was considerably smaller than the Germans had expected – they aimed to deport 4,000 Jews from the Netherlands between July 14 and 17 – the targeted quota was made up from deportees who had arrived the day before at Westerbork. Jozef Hony, who was deported with his wife and child on July 15, testified in 1947: "Our transport was very large. There wasn’t even enough place for everyone in the train so some of them followed the next day."...