Transport from Paderborn, Paderborn (Minden), Westphalia, Germany to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 01/03/1943

This transport, that included Jews from the area of Hanover, was the fourth large transport that left the Reich in connection with the Factory Action. 1,500 people were on board of the train. Apparently, the transport traveled eastwards stopping at a number of towns to pick up additional deportees. A survivor who was deported from Bielefeld remembered in retrospect that the train stopped several times for a period of hours and that it grew in length. 38 Jews, who had been interned in the Horticultural School in Ahlem, joined this transport in Hanover. According to the documentation, not all of the deportees had been used as forced labourers. 32 of the deportees had been living in the Horticultural School for a longer period; twelve of them had been employees of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. More than a quarter of the deportees were under 18 years of age, the youngest of them was a six-year-old. According to the historian Alfred Gottwaldt, Jews from Braunschweig were also added to the transport in Hanover. Ruth Herskovits-Gutmann, whose father worked as the secretary of the Jewish community, lived in the compound of the Horticultural School in Ahlem when this deportation was underway. She mentions the deportation in her memoirs: “At the beginning of March, a small transport of Jews left Ahlem. We did not know that it was destined for Auschwitz – but even if we would have known, the name would have meant nothing to us.”...