On 18 December 1943, a memo was sent by Chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller to the regional police offices, asking that Jewish spouses married to non-Jews, whose marriage ended in divorce or death, be deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
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By 1944, the great majority of the Upper Silesian Jews had already been deported. The elderly were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto beginning in the winter of 1942, and the employees of the Jewish community followed suit thereafter. Those Jews who were not protected by employment with the Jewish community or by marriage to a non-Jewish partner were sent to the Lublin district and to the Auschwitz extermination camp in the summer of 1942 and the early spring of 1943. The only Jews remaining in the province were those married to non-Jewish spouses or children of such unions. The non-Jewish spouses were under constant pressure to divorce their Jewish partners. Once such a divorce was settled, the Jewish spouse would be put on the deportation lists.
This Transport departed from the Oppeln train station on January 20, 1944 and arrived in Theresienstadt on the same day It was the ninth of 10 transports comprising of elderly Jews and others from the province of Upper Silesia who had until now been protected from deportation, and the last transport to depart from Oppeln. The transport consisted of nine Jews, three of them from Oppeln, two from Ratibor, and the rest from smaller Upper Silesian towns. The oldest among the deportees was 95 year-old Fanny Singer.
Presumably, several days prior to the deportation, the deportees were notified by the Gestapo. They were ordered to report to an assembly point in Oppeln. They were ordered to settle their bills and debts, and bring up to 10kg of luggage and the keys to their apartments.
At the assembly point, they were registered and forced to sign a declaration relinquishing their entire property to the state.
Later, they were marched to the Main Train Station (Hauptbahnhof) in Oppeln through a main street, escorted by Gestapo personnel or uniformed police. At the train station, they were forced to enter a railway car (probably a passenger car) that was attached to a regular passenger train. The train’s route was presumably to Breslau, from there to Dresden and finally to the recently-constructed train station in Theresienstadt.
The transport was given the reference XVIII/7 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings where the Roman numeral XVIII refers to Oppeln.
According to historian Alfred Konieczny, four of the deportees died in Theresienstadt from hunger and disease. The other five managed to survive, and were liberated on May 8, 1945.
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