Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 25/01/1944

On Tuesday January 25, 1944, the 84th transport from Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands departed from for Auschwitz. The train comprised 26 cars, cattle wagons, and carried 948 deportees. There were 168 children on this transport; the youngest was born in December 1943. Philip Mechanicus a journalist who was imprisoned in Westerbork wrote in his diary on that day: “In a tearing gale and pouring rain a transport of 1,000 persons left for Auschwitz. Once more in cattle trucks. The majority were supplied by the S-hut [the barrack for convicts, “Straffällige”; mostly people who had been caught in hiding]- 590 people. The rest were young men of the Aliya, old men from the hospital and thirty-one small nameless children who had been in the orphanage and whose parents were either in hiding or had already been sent to Poland. Among these children was a ten-year-old boy with a temperature of 39.9, i.e., a tenth of a degree too low for him to be included among the lucky people who were “unfit for transport”. They were clearing away S-detainees and unproductive folk who were nothing but a burden on the camp budget.” Dr. Gabriel Italie, another diarist detained in Westerbork confirms that there were a great number of elderly and sick people on this transport, as well as many children. The train from Westerbork to Auschwitz usually followed the route through Beilen, Winschoten and Nieuweschans in the Netherlands where it crossed the border and continued through Bremen, Hamburg (or Hannover) and Berlin in Germany and then through Liegnitz (Legnica), Breslau (Wroclaw), Oppeln (Opole), Cosel (Koźle) and Kattowitz (Katowice) in Poland, until it arrived at the extermination camp....