Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 08/02/1944

On Tuesday February 8, 1944, the 87th transport departed from Westerbork for Auschwitz. The train comprised 36 wagons carrying 1,015 deportees of whom 263 were children. “Perhaps the most abominable transport that has ever gone” wrote Philip Mechanicus, a Jewish journalist who had been interned in Westerbork since October 1943 and kept a diary in the camp. The transport included a few hundred patients from the camp hospital. Towards the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944 the inmates of Westerbork consisted mostly of Jews whose names were on lists that were supposed to protect them from deportation. These lists comprised specific groups such as the Calmeyers. These were Jews protected by Dr. Hans Georg Calmeyer, a German lawyer who worked as an assistant to the Generalkommissariat for Administration and Justice and succeeded in sparing a number of Jews from deportation on the grounds of their undetermined Jewishness. Other groups include Portuguese Jews who tried to prove that they had very little Jewish blood running through their veins and had also enjoyed the protection of Calmeyer; baptized Jews (Jews who had been baptized by a Protestant minister before the war); prominent Jews who were designated for Theresienstadt; Jews who had received certificates enabling them to emigrate to Palestine; workers in the diamond industry who were considered irreplaceable and some other small groups of Jews. There were also some 1,500 to 2000 Jews staying in Westerbork transit who were ‘transportfrei’, meaning that they were available for transport. A few hundred of these were ill and lying in the camp hospital. The population of the camp was no longer supplemented with large numbers of Jews caught during raids because the majority had already been transported to Auschwitz. Only Jews who had been caught in hiding now entered the camp....