Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 02/02/1943

The transport that departed from Westerbork to Auschwitz on February 2, 1943, was the forty-sixth (denoted as ‘IVL’ in Roman numerals) to have left the camp. From lists reconstructed by the NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Dutch Institute for Historical Documentation) after World War II, it is known that 890 people were deported on this transport; 7 of them were prisoners (Häftlinge) and 1 was added at the last moment. The list includes the name of one woman and the remark “mentally ill” (Geisteskrank) instead of her date of birth, but we don't have any more information about her. A pamphlet published by the Dutch Red Cross in October 1953 about the deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz in 1943 presents detailed statistics on the age and sex of the passengers on this transport. According to Guus Luijters, author of the book In Memoriam, the train consisted of 19 cars and there were 85 children on board; all of them, apart from two adolescents who were murdered in Auschwitz later on April 30, 1943, were murdered immediately after they reached the camp. The youngest was Marcel Alexander van Rijk (b. April 30, 1942); the oldest was Louis Bloemist-Kaas (b. 1849). According to Joodse Raad documentation dated February 5, 1943, some 110 ill persons were also deported on this transport. A daily report written by a member of the Jewish Order Police (Ordnungsdienst, OD) in Westerbork indicates that the seventh transport comprising ill persons from Amsterdam reached the camp that day; the first transport of this kind had set out on January 19, 1943. These transports marked the implementation of Zöpf‘s aforementioned program concerning the deportation of Jewish medical patients from the Netherlands which reached its climax with the eviction of patients from the Jewish psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn on January 22, 1943. The report also states that OD personnel were sent to tidy up the hospital following the evacuation of its patients and returned to Westerbork on February 2. Although details about the route taken by the train are not known, it is highly probable that it followed the same course used for previous transports. If so, the train departed from Westerbork and headed to Nieuweschans on the German border where the Dutch railroad company’s locomotive was swapped for one belonging to the "Reichsbahn" (the German railroad company). The train then crossed into occupied Poland via Germany....