Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 17/08/1942

The transport of August 17 1942 was organized by the department for Jewish affairs of the RSHA in the Netherlands. Wilhelm Zoepf was head of this department from February 1942 until the end of the deportations from The Netherlands. However, Erich Rajakowitsch replaced Zoepf for the month of August that year and so was in charge of this transport. On the deportation list compiled by the Lippmann and Rosenthal Bank, a group of 206 men were listed as ‘voluntary’. It is likely that this group consisted of former prisoners of De Kremboong, a labour camp near Hoogeveen in the province of Drenthe. From the beginning of 1942 unemployed Jews had been imprisoned in several labour camps in the Netherlands. De Kremboong was one of these. On July 16 1942 a group of around 150 men were marched (approximately 25 km) from the camp to Westerbork. One of these deportees was Jacques Premselaar. In his statement to the RIOD on November 6 1947, he recalls: “In February 1942 I was sent to a work camp and arrived in Kremboong, near Hoogeveen. When these camps were emptied we were sent to Westerbork where I stayed for approximately three weeks. We were suddenly called to register. Inside the big hall there were many women sitting at typing machines. The doors were closed and sealed off by the police and you could not leave the hall before you had registered. […] It was rumoured that there was a possibility to visit family members and measures could then be taken to go on a transport together, but we never got this chance.”...