Towards the end of November 1941, the Nazi authorities began to deport the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (the Protectorate) to the fortress city of Theresienstadt, about 60 km north of Prague. The city’s 18th century fortress now served as a ghetto. Thousands of deportees were housed in the army barracks under terrible conditions. By depicting Theresienstadt as a "model of Jewish settlement" and thus concealing its role as a transit camp for Jewish deportees, the Nazis were able to camouflage their true objectives and policies namely, the mass annihilation of the Jews.
Show more Commencing in January 1942, transports started to leave Theresienstadt for Riga. Later, some of the transports were sent to extermination camps and murder sites, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maly Trostenets.

In June 1942, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt – Reich Security Main Office) embarked on mass deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to Theresienstadt. The Jews sent there were mostly elderly (above the age of 65). They belonged to various groups consisting primarily of those who had earned high military decorations and citations during the First World War, people of international renown, and Jews who had formerly been married to non-Jewish spouses. Included in the last group were what the Nazis coined Mischling, that is, the offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish unions (a term literally meaning "crossbreed"). Essentially these were Germans deemed by the Nazi racist laws to be Jewish because they did not have full Aryan ancestry.


The Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung), headed by SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Alois Brunner, was responsible for conducting the deportation of Jews from Vienna. The first step was to send out orders to potential deportees indicating when they were to report at the assembly point. At the same time the local Jewish community instructed the deportees that they were allowed to take baggage and personal effects not in excess of 50 kilograms. Each deportee was allowed to take 100 Reichsmark on his/her person.
According to existing documentation, Jews deported to Theresienstadt during the summer-autumn of 1942, reported either to the assembly site at the Jewish school on Kleine Sperlgasse 2 or to Malzgasse 7/Miesbachgasse 8.
Transport No. 29 departed from Aspangbahnhof in Vienna (Wien) on June 28, 1942 and arrived in Theresienstadt on June 29. The transport consisted of 1,005 Jews. 961 deportees were older than 61, the average age of the Jews on that transport was 74 years. The deportees, over 60% of whom were women, included three sisters of the eminent psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, Marie Freud (born in 1861, her number in the transport was IV/2-947), Adolfine Freud (born in 1862, her number in the transport was IV/2-946) and Pauline Winternitz (born in 1864, her number in the transport was IV/2-936).
The train's route took it through Vienna’s Nordbahnhof, Floridsdorf, Jedlersdorf, Stockerau, Absdorf-Hippersdorf, Gmuend, Tabor, Prague (Praha) and Bohusovice.
At the rail station in Bohusovice, the Jews were taken off the train and forced to make their way to Theresienstadt on foot, a distance of about 3 km. This, the second transport to arrive from Vienna, was given the reference IV/2 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings; in this regard the Roman numeral IV refers to Vienna. During the summer months in Theresienstadt many of the elderly Jews from these transports died of starvation and disease. Others were transferred to Treblinka in October 1942 and murdered.
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