On December 18 1943, a memo was sent by Chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller to the regional police offices requiring that Jewish spouses, whose marriages to non-Jews had ended in either divorce or in the death of their non-Jewish partner, be deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
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By that time, the great majority of the Jewish population of Lower Silesia has already been deported to killing sites near Kaunas and Izbica, to Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The only Jews remaining in the provincial capital city of Breslau were those married to non-Jewish spouses or the children of such unions. The non-Jewish spouses were under constant pressure to divorce their Jewish partners. Once such a divorce was ratified, the Jewish spouse would be put on a deportation list.

Transport IX/7 Ez departed from the Odertor train station presumably on January 11 1944 and arrived at Theresienstadt on the same day. It was the ninth of 12 transports meant for the elderly and otherwise privileged Jews from the province of Lower Silesia. However, this was marked a Special Transport made up of only three deportees: Irma Alter, 70 years old; Felix Bloch, 77 years old; and Gertrud Grahmann, 68 years old. All three were residents of Görlitz.

Little is known of Special Transports such as this one. Presumably, the deportees from Görlitz were for some reason unable to join other deportees from Lower Silesia who left Breslau two days earlier on transport IX/7. They were held prior to their deportation at either the courtyard of the “Storch”, the old Orthodox Synagogue at Wallstrasse along with the deportees of transport IX/7, or at the State Police Office in Anger Street. Prior to their deportation, they were forced to sign a declaration relinquishing their entire property to the State.

On the day of the transport, the deportees were taken to the Odertor station with their luggage. They presumably entered the station through a back entrance and were put under guard in either a passenger car or a prisoner car which was connected to a regular passenger train. The exact time and date of the departure is unknown; the journey took 12 hours at the very least, and possibly longer. The train presumably went west to Dresden and from there to Bohusovice (Bauschowitz) via Decin (Tetschen) and Usti nad Labem (Aussig). At the waystations, they might have been joined by deportees from Berlin, Vienna, Magdeburg or Dresden.

The transport was given the reference IX/7 Ez in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings where the Roman numeral IX refers to Breslau, and the letters EZ mark it as a Special Transport (“Einzeltransport”). In Theresienstadt, many of the elderly Jewish deportees died of hunger and disease. Among them were Irma Alter and Felix Bloch who died during the following months. Others were later transferred to extermination camps in the East where they were murdered. The third deportee, Gertrud Grahmann, did not share their fate: at the end of the war, she was liberated in Theresienstadt.
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