Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 03/08/1942

Wolf van Naarden (b. 1920) was the sole survivor of the transport that set out on August 3, 1942, from Westerbork to Auschwitz. After the war, he testified in Rotterdam that his entire family had been given three days to report to the assembly point at the the city gate (Poortgebouw). The deportees were ordered to reach this location by July 29, 1942 and from there they were taken to Westerbork where they spent three days prior to departure. Westerbork was guarded by Dutch gendarmes, members of the Marechaussee, who also watched over the deportees as they proceeded from the camp to the train station in Hooghalen. Hitzerus Mees (1876–1952), a non-Jewish physician who lived in Rotterdam, wrote in his diary on July 30, 1942, that 1,500 Jews from the city had been summoned to the transport but only 1,000 of them had reported to the assembly point at the Stieltjesplein, the location of the Poortgebouw. These Jews, he continued, would be transported to Poland in cattle cars, standing upright for four days with no opportunity to tend to their bodily needs. They would be allowed to bring food for the four-day journey, as well as a winter coat and two blankets; and the Germans would appropriate the blankets once the Jews were dead. Each person would have to take a backpack because families would be separated. They would also have to surrender the keys to their homes and turn over the contents of their dwellings to the Germans as a “contribution” (Liebesgabe). He added that many Jews were committing suicide and that the press was not being allowed to report it. From lists that were reconstructed after World War II by the NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie—the Dutch Institute for War Documentation), it is known that 1,013 Jews were aboard the transport. The NIOD based its information on manifests of the Dutch national railroad company (Nederlandse Spoorwegen). A copy of the deportation manifest also exists in a letter sent by the LIRO-Bank on September 23, 1942 to the General Secretary for Economic Affairs (Generalkommissar für Finanz und Wirtschaft) in The Hague. Once the Jews reached Westerbork, employees of the bank dispossessed them of their remaining money. The list also shows that two of the deportees volunteered to join the transport....