Theresienstadt

Theresienstadt was a ghetto established by the SS on 24 November 1941 in the fortress town of Terezín, about 32 miles (some 50 km) north of Prague in the German-occupied "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". An SS Kommandantur gave orders to a Jewish self-administration responsible for the ghetto's internal organisation, while Czech gendarmes guarded the prisoners. Jews from Bohemia and Moravia were brought there from November 1941; later transports came from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark, and finally from Slovakia and Hungary.

For German and Austrian Jews, the Nazi authorities presented Theresienstadt as an "Altersghetto", deceptively described as a spa town or retirement home. In reality the ghetto was massively overcrowded, and hunger and disease were constant. The SS also used it for propaganda: before a visit by representatives of the International Red Cross on 23 June 1944, the ghetto was subjected to an extensive "beautification" and staged cultural performances.

In less than four years more than 140,000 people were deported to Theresienstadt. More than 35,000 of them died in the ghetto, according to the Terezín Memorial (about 34,000 according to the USHMM). In 63 transports, more than 87,000 people were deported onward to ghettos and killing sites: to Riga from January 1942, to Maly Trostenets and Treblinka in 1942 – including about 16,000 elderly people sent to Treblinka in September and October 1942, none of whom survived – and from 26 October 1942 almost exclusively to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only about 3,800 of them lived to see liberation (about 3,500 according to the USHMM). In the last weeks of the war, evacuation transports from other camps brought around 15,000 more prisoners, and with them typhus. The International Committee of the Red Cross took over the ghetto in early May 1945, and the first Red Army units passed through Terezín on the evening of 8 May 1945.

From Berlin

Between 2 June 1942 and the end of March 1945, 123 transports took 15,122 Berlin Jews to Theresienstadt, according to the list compiled from Gottwaldt and Schulle's chronology; only about 11 per cent of them survived. Most were small "Alterstransporte" of 50 to 100 mostly elderly people. For the first of them, Yad Vashem describes how the deportees – most of them residents of the Jewish old people's home at Große Hamburger Straße 26, which was being turned into an assembly camp – were woken before dawn, taken by tram to Anhalter Bahnhof and put into an old third-class carriage coupled to the regular early train to Dresden; from Bauschowitz (Bohušovice) station they had to walk about 3 kilometres to the ghetto. Four large transports of about 1,000 or more people (17 August, 14 September and 3 October 1942, and 17 March 1943) were dispatched as special trains, at least three of them from the Moabit freight station on Putlitzstraße rather than from Anhalter Bahnhof.

Many of the elderly deportees died of hunger and disease in the ghetto; many others were deported onward and murdered. Of the people on the first large transport (I/46, 17 August 1942), 377 were sent on to Treblinka in September and October 1942 and 19 to Auschwitz in 1944; between 13 and 16 are known to have survived. The transport of 5 June 1942 (I/3) was used to deport 89 relatives of 53 of the Jewish men shot at Sachsenhausen in reprisal for the attack on the "Sowjetparadies" exhibition. The last transport, I/123, left on 27 or 28 March 1945 with 42 people held at the Jewish hospital on Iranische Straße, which then served as the assembly point; 24 of them had originally been listed by the Gestapo for Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück.

125 transports from Berlin brought 14,965 people here; at least 1,696 of them are known to have survived.