Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 24/08/1942

On Monday August 24, a train carrying over 500 deportees left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Among them were four prisoners and two people who had joined the transport voluntarily. Volunteers were recruited when a transport from Amsterdam to Auschwitz did not meet the deportee quota. According to a letter sent by a Westerbork inmate to acquaintances in Amsterdam people would sometimes volunteer to join a transport because they knew members of their families would be on that train. They then had to sign papers to prove they had left voluntarily and were registered as such. The train left from Hooghalen in the morning and arrived in Nieuweschans at about noon. A Dutch witness remembers: “The train tracks were in the middle of fields. We often worked the land near the tracks. Tuesdays at about noon the ‘Jodentrein’ (a train carrying Jews) would pass. They were very long and heavy trains that travelled very slowly, perhaps at the speed of a bicycle". The deportees threw letters, notes and postcards from the train if they could in Zuidbroek, for example, where the train stopped for ten minutes and where the locals waved goodbye when the train departed, or in Winschoten where such letters were collected by locals and taken to a resistance leader in the city who would post them. Other witnesses living on the German side of the border remember how the train used to stop at the station of Weener and a few Jews were allowed to fill some tins with water. Sometimes these people were beaten and whipped by the guarding Gestapo, or the soldiers would open the hydrant so that the jet was too strong to fill the small tins. With their heads down, the Jews would return to the train with a little water....